Talk:past tense

RFV discussion: June 2023
Rfv-sense 'conditional tense'

While it is true that the English past tense is used to express implausible conditions, I am not aware of any language for which such a verb form is labelled a 'past tense' because of such a usage. Moreover, the example sentence is not an example of the usage of 'past tense'. Sense was added by. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:14, 15 June 2023 (UTC)


 * For clarity, I didn't actually add the sense, but my July 2020 edit did change the wording somewhat. The wording immediately prior was:
 * A form of language used in a hypothetical expression to refer to a remote possibility.
 * The sense was originally added by on 27 Feb 2016. It included three examples of the 'tense', of which only one remained by the the time I did my edit.— Pingkudimmi 12:29, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Deleted (please revert if inappropriate); I don't see how sense 2 could ever be quotable. Even in a sentence like "in English, the past tense is used for counterfactual conditionals", it still hinges on a sense 1 interpretation for the term past tense to make sense, because it refers to the fact that the verb form with which English expresses counterfactuals is identical to the verb form for past actions. A valid quotation for sense 2 might be when a language has different morphosyntactic strategies for counterfactuality, etc., and past, but the former is still referred to as "past tense"; but that seems unfathomable.
 * That said, might be an entry worth creating. 蒼鳥 fawk. tell me if i did anything wrong. 07:44, 17 June 2023 (UTC)