Past-Tense Constructions by Bruce Sallee and David Hebert
The passé composé is used to indicate a specific event that was begun in the past and is now completely finished.
Il a fait ses devoirs. |
He did his homework. |
Je suis allé au magasin. |
I went to the store |
Sometimes, you want to refer to past events that don't have a concrete beginning or ending or something that was ongoing over a period of time. This tense is often known as the imparfait, or the “imperfect” tense, because the event can't be isolated at any one particular point in time. In this book, we use the term “imperfect” to describe this tense.
À l'époque, je travaillais à la biblioth⃨que. |
At that time, I worked at the library. |
L'été, j'aimais faire des promenades. |
In the summer, I liked to take walks. |
The plus-que-parfait is used to describe an event that occurred before another past event. It is often used in conjunction with the passé composé to indicate events that took place before, but the construction can appear alone. When it does, a more recent past event is implied. The plus-queparfait must have another point of reference in the past to give it meaning.
The distant past tense works as follows:
J'avais quitté le restaurant. |
I had left the restaurant. |
To keep these tenses straight in your mind, think of the old story of the son who received a letter from his mother; he opened and read it, and at the end of the letter, it said, “I tried to send you some money with this letter, but I had already sealed the envelope.”
This is completely absurd, of course, because of the events described by the tenses. “I had already sealed the envelope” is a plus-que-parfait construction, indicating that it occurred before the other event — the mother's attempt at sending the money with the letter. If she had already sealed the letter, though, how did she write that line?
