Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

Given that, in Diu Indo-Portuguese, the expression of imperfectivity requires the presence of an auxiliary, and also that Past tense prototypically involves suffixation, I take unmarked verbs (which correspond to the morphological root of the verb) to correspond to those I classify as non-Past Perfective forms. With respect to this feature, the temporal implications of such a categorisation merit some further comment:

From a morphological point of view, finite Diu Indo-Portuguese verbs only code a twofold distinction (e.g. fik 'stay, dwell, become' vs. fik-o 'stayed, dwelt, became'; kõp 'buy' vs. kõpr-o 'bought'). One category consistently and obligatorily constructs past reference, and as such it is classified as 'Past'; the remaining forms participate in the expression of various temporal-aspectual combinations (from present habitual to immediate future) which, from a temporal point of view, can only be unified as 'not making explicit reference to the Past', hence the classification as 'non-Past' [Verbal morphology does not license any comparable Future category, and future reference requires a preverbal particle a(d)].

Having clarified the temporal categories which are relevant for Diu Indo-Portuguese, we can now compare the actual temporal value of unmarked stative and dynamic verbs. They do not differ fundamentally, in that none has Past reference. Finer differences between them (e.g. whether or not they make reference to the moment of utterance) derive from their different semantics. Crucially, the habitual reading of both unmarked stative and dynamic verbs can be described as "present habitual" (as opposed to "past habitual", which has a different expression in the language).

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Stative verbs with present reference and dynamic verbs with past perfective reference are marked differently