The notion of past progressive is used to refer to a verbal tense of the English language, known in its original language as past progressive . In this case, the action begins, develops and ends in the past.
It is worth remembering that the past is that which has already passed and that, in a chronological sense, is left behind. The past progressive specifically alludes to something that ended ; that is, it has no continuity in the present.
To form a sentence with this verb tense, we use the verb to be (which in this case we must understand as “estar” , although it can also be translated as “ser”, depending on the context) conjugated in the past tense plus a gerund .
Let's look at an example : “I was watching a TV show.” As can be seen, the action (watching a television program) concluded: the person, therefore, does not continue watching the program in question.
“They were singing” , meanwhile, is another expression in the past progressive. It indicates that “(they) were singing” (that is, they are not singing in the present , but rather they sang before and now they are not doing so).
The past progressive is usually used in three circumstances. It can be linked to what was being carried out when a different action caused an interruption ; to two actions that are carried out simultaneously ; or to an unimportant action or an unknown purpose .
Returning to the first example, “I was watching a TV program…” can be completed with another activity that interrupts ( “… when the power went out” ) or that takes place simultaneously ( “… and preparing dinner” ), to mention two possibilities. . Note that the action that interrupts the proposition in the past progressive is written in the equivalent of our past perfect simple.
It is important to note that in English there are no verb tenses per se, as there are in our language, but rather there are structures that can be used for one or more verb tenses. In this case, we see a coincidence between what in English is called past progressive and our imperfect tense ("loved, feared, left") if we use a construction that consists of joining the verb estar (conjugated in this tense) to the gerund of the verb major.
We talk about the main verb because estar fulfills no other function than indicating the state of the person or object that is placed in the role of the subject , but it does not give us enough information to be able to do without the other verb. Although removing the verb estar from a sentence conjugated in the past progressive could result in an incomplete, grammatically incorrect structure, or a correct one if we replaced it with a comma, in any case it would continue to be intelligible.
For example: if we remove the verb estar from a sentence and express "The man, falling and everyone, screaming" , in this case we only lack contextual information to know when the events take place, but we know perfectly well what they are or were doing. the man and the rest of the people. However, we could not understand the situation if we were told "The man was, and everyone was."
The fact that in English the same structure serves to express more than one tense is one of those little secrets that people who claim that "English is easy to learn" do not take into account. Precisely, it is one of the languages with the most possible combinations of sounds, not so much because of the number of phonemes (which in any case is greater than that of Spanish) but because of the alterations generated by the different accents. Within the same country, two accents can seem like they belong to different languages.