Discontinuous past

Discontinuous past is a category of past tense of verbs argued to exist in some languages which have a meaning roughly characterizable as "past and not present" or "past with no present relevance". The phrase "discontinuous past" was first used in the sense described here in an article by the linguists Vladimir Plungian and Johan van der Auwera published in 2006.

Plungian and van der Auwera distinguish two types of discontinuous past: imperfective and perfective. An imperfective discontinuous past is a tense like "he used to come" in English, which usually carries an implication that the activity was of limited duration.

A perfective discontinuous past is a past tense where the result of the action, not the action itself, was of limited duration and no longer holds at the moment of speech. Thus in a language containing such a tense, the equivalent of "he came" would usually imply that the person has gone away again. Such tenses have also been labelled "anti-resultative" or tenses of "cancelled (or reversed) result".

Similarly, a pluperfect tense such as "he had come" could either be a perfect in the past (implying that the man was still there), or a discontinuous past in the past (implying that the man had come earlier on but had now gone away again). In English the tense can have both meanings.