Examples of preterit

• The preterit is associated with given information and the narrative foreground, while the perfect is associated with new information.

• The present perfect and the preterit are not always clearly separated (as in I('ve) finished my paper).

• The preterit expresses perfective aspect whereas the past perfect overwhelmingly refers to durative or repeated situations.

• This is the first person singular preterit ending for verbs belonging to the first conjugation.

• One can speculate that some time in the future -mos may become a preterit marker.

• For regular verbs the - mos forms are ambiguous between the present and the preterit tenses.

• Others (they are called weak) add a dental suffix (d or t) in the preterit and the past participle, for example, beg/begged/begged, look/looked/looked, wait/waited/waited.

• This level contains most of the present tense forms as well as certain preterit forms.

• The verb is in the preterit, a perfective past tense, which guarantees that the sentence is episodic.

• That would involve the emergence of the preterit, for example, appearing equally in all categories; the same for present, imperfect, and progressive as they emerge.

• They were first asked to complete a task to see whether they recognized the morphological distinction between preterit and imperfect.

• Since preterit desinences are stressed more frequently than present desinences, this induces a biased surface distribution, with -mosoccurring more frequently with past tense reference.

• For regular verbs the -mosforms are ambiguous between the present and the preterit tenses.

• The evidential status of the past perfective forms (preterit) is not clear in the narratives in this study although its uses correspond to foreground events.

• Sentences with a verb in the preterit (or the perfect) existentially quantify over a single event, hence the episodic interpretation.

• In other words, the high rate of marking of preterits in comparison to non-preterits is illusory.

• The overall distribution, then, shows preterit forms mainly on the higher levels of the hierarchy, whereas the present is found mostly on the lower levels.

• For the younger speakers, however, even a salient form has less chance of occurring with -mosif it is not a preterit.

• Level 3 contains only present tense forms, whereas level 4 has preterit as well as a few present tense forms.

• In particular, preterit forms can occur only on levels 2, 4, and 5 and are concentrated mainly in levels 4 and 5.

• The first two, however, are preterit, and the last is present.