Good evening everyone! Recentle I've been wondering if it's okey to use always with past simple. Here's a sentence I made up as an example:
Baking cakes was always a hard task for me.
Is it grammatically correct?
Thanks in advance!
Learn English – The usage of “was always”
grammarpast-tensepresent-tensesentenceusage
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It may help to straighten out some terminology. Loved is always a past participle. That's because the past participle of a regular verb adds the suffix -ed to the regular form (i.e., the form used in the infinitive), with the proviso that the suffix replaces a final e. This means that past participles are always verb forms.
Past participles have a role in the predicate of indicating tense and voice:
- With the auxiliary have for the present perfect tense ("I have always loved you.")
- With the auxiliary had for the past perfect tense ("I had loved you before I hated you.")
- With the auxiliary forms of be for the passive voice. ("You are loved by me.")
Past participles have roles outside the predicate. They can modify nouns. Consider Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One.
They can head noun phrases. We don't use loved this way, relying on the now-defective verb belove, which appears only in the passive: "My beloved is like a gazelle...."
And they can appear in absolutes, associated with main clauses: "Loved by all, the general bowed to the cheering crowd."
With these uses comes a syntactic ambiguity. When the past participle (e.g, loved) follows the third person singular, present tense of to be (i.e, is), are we to interpret is as 1) an auxiliary forming the passive voice or 2) a copular verb followed by a nominative predicate? To rephrase, does
He is loved
mean that he is 1) an object of love or 2) a recipient of loving? That's a matter of semantics. We can only tell for sure if an agent is identified in a prepositional phrase with by:
He is loved only by his mother.
That's case 1), the passive voice, because we can transpose to active voice:
Only his mother loves him.
There is no reason you couldn’t use the simple past tense in the first example.
I explained this rule to you for half a lesson before I gave a test
There is also no reason you couldn’t use the past perfect tense in the second sentence.
They had been married for a few years before divorcing in 2016.
These are both grammatical, as are your original examples. The use of before, when, and other explicit indications of relative time serve to make it not strictly necessary to use tense to indicate relative time, so the chance of ambiguity is reduced in this kind of situation. It is not coincidental that the second sentence also has such explicit indications of the relative time of each clause.
The distinction here is that my modified first example might imply that that explaining took place immediately prior to the test—that is, half a lesson was dedicated to explaining the rule in question, and then a test on that subject was given in the second half of the lesson. Adding had here will separate the two clauses more in time, leading to a stronger expectation that the half-lesson on the rule was further back in time before the test.
Let me emphasize, however, that neither sentence is entirely unambiguous about how much time did or didn’t pass between the explaining and the test-giving. If it were necessary to be very clear on that, another clause explicitly saying so would be necessary.
Anyway, that consideration doesn’t come into play for the second sentence—divorce is the end of the marriage, so the couple in question was “married” for the entire time up until the divorce in 2016. That means that the possible implication that the divorce immediately followed “being married” is entirely accurate—they really were married right up until they weren’t. Note that this means that the verb here, really, is were, while married is an adjective describing the couple’s marital status (as “Yes,” basically). We could change this to had married a few years before or had been married a few years before or had been married for a few years before, at which point that entire clause is the verb. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but it also doesn’t add any meaning, or even implicit nuance, to the sentence—which means most English speakers aren’t going to do it. It makes the verb more complicated without adding anything to the sentence.
Ultimately, what this example comes down to is the flexibility of the word married. It can be an adjective describing an ongoing marital status (“the married man”), or a verb describing taking part in a particular event at a specific point in time (the wedding, or even more precisely whatever moment during the ceremony is considered to be the point where the couple’s marital status changes, whether that’s the exchanging of vows, a kiss, signing a document, or whatever). Moreover, as a verb, it can be transitive (“he married them,” where he is the officiant and they are the now-married couple), or intransitive (“they married,” where they are the now-married couple). The flexibility on being transitive can also be used to change the voice without actually changing the meaning of a sentence in some cases (“they married” and “they were married” would ordinarily mean exactly the same thing, that they are now married).
Best Answer
It is grammatical. To me it seems less likely than "has always been", because it implies that the possibility of baking cakes is no longer present.
But a case where it would be natural would be if the very thing which is no longer current is finding it hard to bake cakes: if they go on to say that since some experience they now find it easy, then the simple "was" will be quite natural.