SuStel:1. Is this sentence right in English?: *She had been studying from morning to evening, so the next day she passed the exam with no problem*. If it's a correct sentence, wouldn't here the ongoing action of studying be presented as a whole with a beginning and an end and as complete before the action of passing the exam? Or do you say in English *She had studied* and therefore use *-pu'*?She had been studying from morning to evening is the past perfect progressive tense. It describes an action that is continuous from morning to evening. It implies that studying at some point prior to the time context had been ongoing. The past perfect version of this would be She had studied from morning to evening. I'm not sure if this is perfective. I don't think so — it describes the same continuous action from morning to evening. Not being progressive in English doesn't mean it can't be continuous in Klingon. In Klingon these would both be po ram je qubbID HaDtaH ghaH, jaj veb vaj qaD Qappu' 'ej ngeD qaD.So, in order to use *-taH* or *-lI'*, it's not necessary that the ongoing action continues after the time context, right? This ongoing action can have taken place *before* the time context, like in the example above, or *after* it.
I don't think you're identifying the time context correctly. In po ram je qubbID HaDtaH ghaH, jaj veb vaj qaD Qappu' 'ej ngeD qaD, we have two distinct time contexts. po ram qubbID HaDtaH ghaH is set in po ram qubbID the time between morning and night, and jaj veb vaj qaD Qappu' is set in jaj veb the next day. HaDtaH is continuous over po ram qubbID, and Qappu' takes place sometime in jaj veb. (ngeD qaD is a sort of timeless fact, though it refers to something that existed during jaj veb). They take place when their time expressions say they do.
When we say that -taH and -lI' represent
continuation, we don't mean that they necessarily occur before or
after the stated time context. We mean that we're zooming in on
our view of the action and talking about a point at which the
action has already been happening and after which the action will
continue. That point is not congruous with the time context,
thought it is within it. When we say po ram qubbID HaDtaH
ghaH, we don't mean that he was already studying before the
morning and still studying after the night; we mean that at any
point between po and ram we can zoom in to see the
studying and see that it was occurring before that point and will
be occurring after that point. It is continuous. This is what it
means to say that we describe an action's internal structure. For
perfective actions, we can't zoom in on it and examine its
behavior at any point; we are zoomed out and can only pinpoint a
spot on a timeline where the action occurred in its entirety.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name