Sentence examples for imperfect subjunctive from inspiring English sources
noun
(in several languages) The imperfect tense in the subjunctive mood
The imperfect subjunctive is a literary form, never used in speech.
Nonetheless, a reader, Laurence Partis, has obliged with a full imperfect subjunctive conjugation.
Rashly, I asked readers to conjugate the imperfect subjunctive of the verb "loler".
Take the imperfect subjunctive tense, for instance: "Not even my grandmother spoke like that!" complains one girl.
The tenses were based on the present stem (present, imperfect, subjunctive present, and prohibitive) and the aorist past stem (aorist, subjunctive aorist, and imperative).
His interactions with them generate moments of hilarity (including a raucous discussion of the imperfect subjunctive, a point of French grammar that has caused untold misery in French classes around the world) and also painful collisions and misunderstandings.
A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms.
(I stress this point in Spade [1992].) Latin has a refined sense of counterfactual propositions, marked by imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive forms of verbs.
The verb system is complex but, by and large, regular: it uses indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods; preterite, imperfect, present, future, conditional, and a variety of perfect and progressive tenses; and passive and reflexive constructions.
Another construction that replaces the subjunctive by the imperfect indicative in the "if" clause is normal in Catalan and in French as well as in Corsica and Sardinia: Catalan si estudiaves ho sabries ('if you studied, you would know'); French si j'avais assez d'argent, je l'achèterais ('if I had enough money, I'd buy it'); Logudorian si denía abba deo dia buffare ('if I had water, I'd drink').
"And he spoke French so well," one French journalist after another points out, forgetting that LeMond was as lost as Armstrong in the past imperfect tense, not to mention the subjunctive, early in his career.
