2.11.1 Aspect: preterite and imperfect

What is “verbal tense”?

Tense truly means time.  There are only three times, the past, the present and the future and those are the true verb tenses.  All of our verbal conjugations fit into one of those time frames.  We also call them planes of time because there are many ways we can talk about when things have happened, are happening or will happen.  The past, for example, is not only one specific point in time. One of the ways that we can specify exactly when in time an action occurs is via verbal aspect.  .

What is “verbal aspect”?

As it says above, aspect allows us to locate something very specifically in time.  The verb itself tells us whether or not an event is ongoing or finished at the time we are speaking of.  Spanish has several aspectual distinctions: simple present versus present progressive (voy a la clase versus estoy yendo a la clase), the perfect conjugations that we’ll see in chapter 6, and the preterite/imperfect distinction.