Tense and Aspect in Discourse

In natural circumstances, sentences do not occur in isolation but follow one another in discourse. Tense and aspect work together to form connections between phrases and sentences. Often a series of past tense verbs represent activities that occur in the order in which they are mentioned. In other words, the actions are temporally sequenced. This is especially true when the actions are coordinated with the conjunction and.

Here are examples

Paul tripped and fell down the stairs.
Linda sipped some herbal tea and put her cup on the table.
Alice opened the car door and got in.

In the examples, the second phrase logically follows the first. The reverse order would be strange. The sentence Linda put her cup on the table and sipped some herbal tea is possible but unlikely.  However, in cases with no predictable order of actions, we encounter the same phenomenon. Here are examples:

Mark ate lunch and took a nap.
Susan smiled and took the girl's hand.
Leonard laughed and walked to the hotel.

Although the two events in each sentence could easily occur in the reverse order, the reader assumes the order of the events is the order in which they are told. John stopped the car and got out is very different from John got out and stopped the car. There can be significant time gaps between ordered events, i.e., He got married and had six children.

When the actions of phrases continue over a long period of time, they can be interpreted as interconnected: We ate pizza and drank beer all evening; The teenagers sang and danced at the concert; I coughed and sneezed all morning. In these cases the phrases are not temporally ordered.

In discourse sentences follow one another. Tense and aspect often combine to form connections. A series of past tense verbs are often temporally sequenced, and this is especially true when the conjunction and combines the actions.