On Mar 10, 12:33 pm, Brad Eckert tinyboot.com> wrote:

It shares something in that respect with a variety of patois / creole
dialects. In Grenadian patois there are very few verb forms ... mostly
present simple and present continuing ... with tense conveyed in
adjectival phrases that relocate the present to a different time.
Instead of "I was going to the store", "That time, I going the store".
Most adverbs of stress (very, etc.) are conveyed by repetition. "That
pepper sauce hot hot hot".

You often can't make sense of the tense of a sentence if you haven't
been following the story, since "that time" could be a year ago, this
morning, next week Monday. Information conveyed or supplemented by
formal syntax in more rigid, encrusted languages like standard
academic English requires keeping up with the meaning of what went
before.