Combined with the imperfective past it is used to indicate the conditional, and with the perfective past to indicate the inferential. If the future particle precedes the present perfect form, a future perfect form results.
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Imperfective past tenses can also have a discontinuous implication, such as the English "I used to live in London", which carries the implication that the speaker no longer lives there.Plungian & Auwera, p.323. One author uses the term "decessive" for this usage.Cable, Seth (2015): "The Tlingit Decessive and 'Discontinuous Past'".
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The Awngi verbal morphology has a wealth of inflectional forms. The four main tenses are imperfective past, imperfective non-past, perfective past and perfective non-past. There are various other coordinate and subordinate forms which are all marked through suffixes to the verb stems. The following distinctions are maintained for Person: 1sg, 2sg, 3masc, 3fem, 1pl, 2pl, 3pl.
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For example, in the Bantu language Chichewa, use of the remote past tense ánáamwalíra "he died" would be surprising since it would imply that the person was no longer dead.cf. Watkins, Mark Hanna, A Grammar of Chichewa (1937), p. 56. This kind of past tense is known as discontinuous past. Similarly certain imperfective past tenses (such as the English "used to") can carry an implication that the action referred to no longer takes place.cf.
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The verb phrase is composed of an obligatory root and TAM (tense–aspect–mood) suffix. The TAM suffix may indicate imperative (hàzɩ̀ "sweep!"), aorist (ɛ́házɩ̀ "and he swept"), perfective (ɛ̀hàzàá "he swept"), imperfective present (ɛ̀házɩ̀ɣ̀ "he is sweeping"), imperfective past (ɛ̀hàzàɣ́ "he was sweeping") or infinitive (hàzʋ́ʋ̀ "to sweep"). Kabiye is unusual in also having two designated paradigms for expressing comparatives in a subordinate clause: an imperfective form (ɛ̀zɩ́ ɛ̀hàzʋ̀ʋ̀ʋ́ yɔ́ "as he sweeps") and a perfective form (ɛ̀zɩ́ ɛ̀hàzʋ́ʋ̀ yɔ́ "as he swept").
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While in Semitic languages tripartite non-past/past imperfective/past perfective systems similar to those of most Indo-European languages are found, in the rest of Africa past tenses have very different forms from those found in European languages. Berber languages have only the perfective/imperfective distinction and lack a past imperfect. Many non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages of West Africa do not mark past tense at all but instead have a form of perfect derived from a word meaning "to finish". Others, such as Ewe, distinguish only between future and non-future.
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There are indicative mood forms for, in addition to the future-as-viewed-from-the-past usage of the conditional mood form, the following combinations: future; an imperfective past tense–aspect combination whose form can also be used in contrary-to-fact "if" clauses with present reference; a perfective past tense–aspect combination whose form is only used for literary purposes; and a catch-all formulation known as the "present" form, which can be used to express the present, past historical events, or the near-future. All synthetic forms are also marked for person and number. Additionally, the indicative mood has five compound (two-word) verb forms, each of which results from using one of the above simple forms of "to have" (or of "to be" for intransitive verbs of motion) plus a past participle. These forms are used to shift back the time of an event relative to the time from which the event is viewed.
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