Today on the Zondervan blog there was a post entitled Can the Imperfect not be Continuous? (Monday with Mounce 85). In an nutshell, there are a couple problems. First, if we are going to use a single word to describe the tense-form, then how about using “incomplete” instead of “continuous”? Mounce lists several different categories from Wallace that do not qualify as continuous.

Of more immediate interest is the central focus of the post: instantaneous imperfects. This is a class of usage cataloged by Wallace that happen all to be verbs of speaking. In most cases, they end up reintroducing the same speaker within what would otherwise be a single speech rather than switching to a new speaker; this makes them even more of an oddity. For this reason, I think they are better described in the following matter, rather than as though they were normal uses of the imperfect. Here is a link to a PDF excerpt from the Discourse Grammar that provides an alternate description to that provided by Mounce or Wallace. I would have posted it directly, but the formatting  does not convert readily to HTML.