Grammar Spod: Past Continuous

I am delighted to share with you the undeniable secrets of the lovely English language once again this month.

Having had a closer look at the Past Simple tense in last month’s StopPress, this time we will be looking at the Past Continuous tense, also know by some as the Past Progressive tense.

The Past Continuous tense

Let’s turn to the ever so useful Cambridge Advanced Learners’ Dictionary for the definition of the Past Continuous tense:

‘The grammatical tense used to describe an action which someone was doing or an event which was happening at a particular time. It is made with ‘was’ or ‘were’ and the –ing form of a verb.’

We use the Past Continuous tense for the following:

To say that an action was in progress at a particular time in the past; the action had already started at this time, but had not finished:

“I was having dinner at 7 o’clock last night, what were you doing?”

To say that an action was in progress at every moment during a period of time:
“We were laughing all the way through the lesson.”

Together with the past simple.
The past continuous refers to a ‘longer’ or ‘background’ action that was in progress; the past simple refers to a shorter action that interrupted the longer action, or happened in the middle of it:
“I was studying when my best friend called me.”

To say that an action in the past was temporary:
“Dan was writing for StopPress last year, wasn’t he?”

With words such as ‘always’ to talk about things that happened repeatedly:
“He was always boasting about writing for StopPress.”

There are some verbs that are not normally used in the past continuous tense: believe, belong, depend, hate, know, like, love, mean, need, prefer, realise, suppose, want and understand.

I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the use of the Past Continuous tense. Please let me know if there is a tense or a grammatical concept you would like to read about in particular in one of the following editions of StopPress. I would be delighted to hear from you at stoppress@laltorbay.co.uk.

Until next month – yours sincerely,

Countess Grammar
[AM]