Past Perfect Tense

8 Key excerpts on "Past Perfect Tense"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Language of Fiction

  A Writer’s Stylebook

  • Brian Shawver(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University Press of New England

    (Publisher)

  part two

  Fundamentals of Language

  Passage contains an image

  six

  The Past Perfect

  I mentioned in chapter 1 that you don’t have to memorize the names of the more complicated verb tenses, but there’s one exception: the past perfect. This comes up so often for the writer and reader, and has to be used with such nuance and artistry, that you might as well know what it’s called.

  We use the simple past tense for most events that happened at finite moments in the past. Marty skipped home. Lucy smirked . But so much of language is chronological — a speaker or writer relating not just what happened, but when — that we have to find ways to indicate where certain events occurred relative to other events on the time continuum. The primary way of doing this is to use the past perfect.

  To understand what the past perfect is, we need to look at how it’s constructed, and what it indicates. Here’s the past perfect in action: Veronica had warned Deke about her lizard, but he screamed anyway.

  “Had warned” is a past perfect construction. As you can see, a writer creates it by combining a form of the verb “to have” (in this case, “had”) with a past participle (in this case, “warned”). A past participle is usually the infinitive form of a verb with -ed stuck on the end; the infinitive “to warn” becomes “warned.” That’s how you make the past perfect — had plus a participle.

  Now for what it indicates: the past perfect teams up with the simple past tense to tell us when things occurred relative to other things. In our example sentence, we have two events that occurred at two different points on the time spectrum. We don’t know if Veronica warned Deke last Wednesday or five years ago, but we do know her warning occurred before he screamed. The Past Perfect Tense (“had warned”), when juxtaposed with the simple past tense (“screamed”), tells us so. The two different forms of the past tense don’t even have to be in the same sentence to indicate the time relationship of the events. It could look like this:

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Meaning and the English Verb

  • Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  he had written, etc.) signifying ‘past in the past’. My main goal, in this chapter, is to show how the Perfect is distinguished in meaning from the Past, first of all concentrating on the Present Perfect Tense. To begin with, it is worth making the point that Present Perfect and Simple Past are not mutually exclusive choices: there are many situations where either of these tenses would be suitable.

  At its most general, the Perfect Aspect is used for an earlier happening which is seen in relation to a later event or time as a reference point: in one word, the Perfect represents ‘beforeness’, or ANTERIORITY . Thus the Present Perfect means ‘past-time-related-to-present-time’.

  Present perfect tense 54

  The Present Perfect, as distinct from the Simple Past Tense, is often described as referring to ‘past with present relevance’, or ‘past involving the present’. There is a great deal of truth in this description, but on its own it is too vague to tell us exactly when and when not to use the Present Perfect. There are actually two distinct ways in which a past event may be related to the present by means of the Perfect: (a) it may involve a time period lasting up to the Present, and (b) it may have results persisting at the present time. Moreover, we can distinguish not just two, but four different uses of the Present Perfect, one of them occurring with ‘state verbs’ and three with ‘event verbs’. We begin with the ‘state’ use, which is conceptually the best starting point, although it will turn out that the fourth use (resultative) is the most common (see §§59 , 60 ).

  a.  The construction have got appears to be the Perfect form of the main verb get. Although it is possible to use it in this way (as in Sam’s got meaner in the last couple of years), it is more likely that have got is interpreted as a ‘state present’ equivalent to have (We’ve got plenty of fruit = We have plenty of fruit

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Language Contact in Europe

  The Periphrastic Perfect through History

  • Bridget Drinka(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  More recently, Johanson (2000: 35) has provided a succinct definition of the present perfect as –PAST (+POST) LF, that is, a “non-past postterminal with low focality.” “Postterminality” is one of three “viewpoint operators” 5 or prime aspectual dimensions he proposes, and is characterized as “envisaging the event after the transgression of its relevant limit, post terminum” (Johanson 2000: 29). The metaterm +POST implies that the event is still relevant in some way: it “extends right up to O [orientation point], has effects relevant to O, or allows a conclusive judgment at O” (Johanson 2000: 103). Dahl and Velupillai (2013), in like manner, define the perfect as a category “used to express events that took place before the temporal reference point which have an effect on or are in some way still relevant to that point.” They only regard languages as having perfects if they use both the resultative and the experiential sense. 49 49 3.3 Arguments for the Universality of the Perfect Finally, it is also possible to regard the perfect as a “derived stative,” since it bestows stative qualities on events that do not naturally possess them (Drinka 2003b: 111). 3.2 Distribution of Perfects in the Languages of the World Before proceeding to a detailed examination of how perfects are formed in the languages of the world, we should recall their global distribution, touched on in Chapter 1. As shown there in the WALS map of the distribution of the per- fects worldwide (Figure 1.2), perfects are well dispersed across the languages of the world, and are especially concentrated in Western Europe and in South and Southeast Asia. Many African languages also use perfects, as do many in Mesoamerica and nearby northwestern South America. Elsewhere in South America, however, and in Australia, there are very few perfects.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  New Challenges in Typology

  Transcending the Borders and Refining the Distinctions

  • Patience Epps, Alexandre Arkhipov, Patience Epps, Alexandre Arkhipov(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In the case of French, the simple perfective past (or passé sim-ple ), which in Old French (12 th century) was used in variation with the periphrastic form for marking foregrounded events in narratives, is only rarely heard in spoken Modern French and is preserved primarily in written registers (see Squartini and Bertinetto 2000). The simple past in German 156 Chad Howe (i.e. schrieb ‘wrote’) also has a similar distribution with respect to the peri-phrastic form, being used largely in non-conversational registers. These two situations, according to Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994), typify the perfect > perfective pathway and demonstrate that as one form becomes more widely used in a particular context – in this case the compound past in reference to past eventualities – forms sharing that semantic space may be displaced and relegated to distinct registers or dialects. As we shall see in the forthcoming discussion of the perfect in Spanish, this type of mar-ginalization of contextual interpretations does not seem to characterize all situations in which the perfect is reported to have taken on perfective uses. Also germane to the current discussion is the development of perfects with evidential uses, as attested, for example, in Turkish and Bulgarian (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994: 95). West (1980: 75) describes this type of construction in Tucano, spoken in parts of Brazil and Colombia, where the speaker uses the verb ‘be’ in conjunction with a non-finite form of another verb to indicate an inference based on results. In the case of the Spanish perfect, it has been noted that the perfect has acquired evidential uses in varieties spoken in contact with Quechua (see Escobar 1997, among others). One result of this extension is the possible co-occurrence with adverbials denoting definite past time reference (e.g. last year ), suggesting some parallels in terms of temporal expression with the type of develop-ments attested in the German and French examples.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Tempus

  The World of Discussion and the World of Narration

  • Harald Weinrich, Jane K. Brown, Marshall Brown, Jane K. Brown, Marshall Brown(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  Even in the Latin perfectum of the classical period the structural boundary between discourse and narration is present grammatically. It separates the perfectum of deponent and passive verbs, used primarily discursively, from the perfectum of active verbs, which are used mostly for narration. The further development of the languages clearly elaborates this structure. Both categories are filled out: the discursive perfectum with the helping verb habet, the narrative perfectum with the helping verb fuit. Both elaborations remain morphologically within the structural framework already prepared by classical Latin. Whorf, Spengler, and the Hopi Indians How should we describe the tense systems of languages very different from ours? It seems simple if we just impose the categories we know, or believe we know, from our own language. Of course, it is possible in most languages to identify, somehow, past events and future events, incomplete events and those completed. This question is only whether the verb forms of this language are really organized in terms of time and aspect. It could well be that they are organized by quite different categories and into quite different structures. It is difficult to tell. Most of the linguists who have addressed the task of describing a language very distant from the family of Indo-European languages have scarcely bothered with this question. They have applied the categories of time and aspect to them with tiresome uniformity, certain that they were in possession of a philologically reliable and philosophically verified assumption. The result is a list of aspects and tenses whose length depends on the language; the labels vary in part even though certain terms like perfective/imperfective, progressive, and iterative constantly recur. Do these tense descriptions really do those languages justice? Of course, no one can judge that definitively without knowing the language at least as well as the linguist or missionary who described it

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Perfect Explorations

  • Artemis Alexiadou, Monika Rathert, Arnim von Stechow, Artemis Alexiadou, Monika Rathert, Arnim von Stechow(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  (v) Historically again, the perfect was one of the three Indo-European stems of the verb, which are believed to have denoted three aspects, namely perfective, imperfective and perfect, the latter denoting a state (cf. Chantraine 1927). Some remnants of this semantic situation survived into Classical Greek in a few so-called Perfects with a pre-sent meaning such as pephuka 'be by nature', dedoika 'be afraid', oida 'know', while the morphological tripartite division survived intact into Classical and even Hellenistic Greek. Its periphrastic re-placement could be seen a priori as a third aspect. 4.2. The Perfect as tense The main arguments for its being a tense: (i) The fact that as a cross-linguistic category it is defined as linking the past with the present, a feature from which all its four meanings are said to derive; a form linking two deictic timepoints could be seen as a priori deictic itself. (ii) Classifying the perfect as an aspect would destroy the binary aspec-tual opposition of perfective and imperfective; this would not be a Tense, aspect, and the Greek Perfect 239 real problem if it could be shown to have a similar function to the other two, namely the function of looking at the event in terms of its internal temporal structure (either ignoring it or taking it into ac-count). Assuming that we accept this definition of the category of aspect, trying to squeeze the perfect into it would bring us at an im-passe: we would necessarily have to see it as akin to the imperfec-tive, because it sees the event as having occurred in the past but con-tinuing into the present.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar

  • Martin J. Endley(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The first situation is in the past relative to the second and so is marked for past perfect; the second situation is in the past relative to the time of speaking and so is marked for simple past tense. Notice also that in (94), the order of the two clauses follows the actual order of events, with the earlier situation being mentioned first. This does not always happen. In (95), the actual order of the two situations is not reflected in the order of clauses: (95) The professor was pleased that all the students had passed the exam. The potential for confusion is made worse because sometimes either a past simple or a past perfect form can be used with no change of meaning as in (96), but on other occasions only a past perfect conveys the appropri- ate meaning as in (97): (96) a. I got to the office after Bill arrived. b. I got to the office after Bill had arrived. But: (97) a. When I got to the office, the meeting started. b. When I got to the office, the meeting had started. The following pair of mini-narratives from Givón provide a nice illustra- tion of how the past perfect functions in discourse: (98) (From Givón, 1993a, p. 163) A. B. a) She came back into the room, a) She came back into the room b) looked around, b) and looked around. c) spotted the buffet, c) She had spotted the buffet earlier, d) and went to get a sandwich. d) so she went to get a sandwich. 258  Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar Both A and B recount the same events. The difference lies in the fact that in A, the events are presented in their proper temporal sequence (i.e., in the order in which they occurred). Grammatically, this effect is achieved by mark- ing all the verbs as simple past. Contrast this with B. In B, events (a), (b), and (d) remain in their natural order and so are marked with the simple past. But (c) is displaced (i.e., it is recounted after [b] although it actually occurred before [b]). Grammatically, this is signaled by use of the past perfect.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Grammaticalization of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality

  A Functional Perspective

  • Kees Hengeveld, Heiko Narrog, Hella Olbertz, Kees Hengeveld, Heiko Narrog, Hella Olbertz(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  imparfait . I will elaborate on this point in the remainder of this section.

  Perfectivity in French (unlike in Slavic languages) is the grammatical counterpart of lexical telicity. All verbs are compatible with all past tenses, but the use of the simple past or the perfect with an atelic expression causes a reinterpretation: the verbal expression necessarily receives a telic reading. For example, when there is a time span is assigned to the atelic process, it thereby becomes telic. Consider (21) and its variants for the different readings of hésiter ‘hesitate’:

  In example (21a) with the imperfective past, the reading is atelic, whereas in the perfective variants, with the passé simple and the perfect, (21b) and (21c), respectively, only a telic reading is available. The perfect or passé simple may also cause an inchoative interpretation.

  The verb used in all three versions of (22) is avoir ‘have‘, but with simple past (22c) or perfect (22b), the most obvious meaning is ‘to catch jaundice’, i.e. the inchoative of ‘have jaundice’. Inchoative expressions are necessarily telic, as already mentioned in the discussion of examples (2) and (3) above.

  Thus the grammaticalization of the perfect in French means a diachronic shift from transformativity – in the first uses of the construction as resultative – to telicity, yielding a perfective past tense with telicizing effects on lexical aspect. In this process, transformativity in the first stages is a lexical constraint on grammatical form, as the resultative can be used only with transformative expressions, whereas telicity in the last stage is a grammatical constraint on lexical semantics, because the lexical expressions have to be interpreted in a telic way. The grammaticalization of the French perfect is also a grammaticalization of aspect.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book