are these the same thing, and are they:

had + past tense

i.e.

had bothered
had seen
hadn't listened

?

Just looked it up in David Crystal, who says that he doesn't call it 'perfect' and 'plu-perfect' because unlike the Latin these terms came from they're not really verb forms, as the endings don't change, but verb phrases made with an auxiliary verb (the 'have' bit) which are in the 'perfective aspect':

present perfective: I have lived

past perfective: I had lived

Emma


<Added>

thinking of 'perfect' and 'plu-perfect' in French, they use the same perfect form, 'J'ai marché' for 'I walked' and 'I have walked', but they're different for us. And then the plu-perfect 'J'avais marché' for 'I had walked'? Maybe that's where the terms come from, but they don't quite fit English.


My French is terribly rusty - someone tell me I'm wrong

So what would you call it normally - past perfective? Is that actually different from past perfect? I've never heard that term.

In the world of Teaching English as a Foreign Lanuage, where I spent many a tedious year, we called it Past Perfect. It's the same as Past Perfective. Um. . . I can't remember what you use it for. But I wasn't much of a teacher.

I think past perfect is used more for story-telling where as the perfect is used for dialogue etc.

I don't think the past perfect is used instead of the plu-perfect, it is used instead of the ordinary perfect -

eg He went instead of he has gone
He ate instead of he has eaten

the first examples are the past perfect (went ate)

I'm also a bit rusty though

<Added>

Ooh, now i think about it, i'm thinking of the Past Historic - that's what went and ate are. (this is from learning french)

When I taught EFL we always used to call it "the first past" when we described it or "the past before the past". You can draw it with a time line, but I can't do that on a computer. But the pluperfect is the same as the past perfect. The historic doesn't exist in English, does it? Also "went" and "has gone" is more about aspect than tense. They mean different things. If you say"He's gone to the bank" and "He went to the bank" the first means he's still there but the second doesn't necessarily.

My head's bursting with this thread.

Very interesting though - i've a degree in French and German and studied linguistics and i've never heard about the past perfect before.

Er, unless i was catnapping in lectures

x

I love grammar! *sighs*

You should talk to Luisa, then!

x

Oh, yeah. 'The past before the past.' I remember that.

It's also a crucial one when you teach your foreign student how to write stories, cos it's one of the 'narrative tenses' or something. You generally use it when telling stories, 'He had been travelling for two days and two nights when he realised he was going to the wrong place.'

(Except that's not a very good story.)

I vaguely remember having to try to teach and/or explain the difference between these tenses and think the difference is more noticeable in a foreign language than in English. I'd say that Sappho is on the right lines in this regard.

Terms like preterite, imperfect and future perfect keep swinging back into this poor little brain... Oh joy of joys, I still have vague recollections of how to use them - just not how to explain it all in English!

James

I'll try and check tomorrow at work in Swann and Walter.

Having studied Latin and had these things drummed into me, I believe that part of the problem is that more recently the 'educationalists' have made everything seem far more difficult by inventing complicated names for the tenses and then changing them at regular intervals.

For what it's worth, here's my take:

I write/I am writing - Present
I was writing/I used to write - Imperfect
I wrote - Preterite (or Past Historic)
I have written - Perfect
I had written - Pluperfect
I will have written - Future Perfect
I would write (but not in the sense of I used to write) - Conditional

There are others, but those are the basics.

Chris

Emma

You're right in saying that the French use the perfect 'j'ai marché' for 'I walked' and for 'I have walked' but this is true only in spoken French. In written French they would use the preterite/past historic 'je marchai' for 'I walked' and the perfect 'j'ai marché' for 'I have walked'. It's never simple, is it?

Chris

Heavens! Didn't know all of these terms existed - came across Past Historic and Imperfect in French but never knew the rest. Are there any more interesting tenses?