0 the tense used to describe actions, events, or states that happened or existed before the present time:
1 relating to the tense used to describe actions, events, or states that happened or existed before the present time:
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.
