Before I talk about the past perfect, I want to comment on the
subjunctive. One of the differences between American English and British
English is the fact that we in North America use the subjunctive much
more frequently than those across the pond.  See A comprehensive grammar
of English p. 1013.

Now, I sure wish I knew what evidence there is for the following claim
about the disappearance of the past perfect in English.

> Many aspects of the current changes underway in English grate on me,
> such as loss of the past perfect;

Biber et al. (1999), Longman grammar of spoken and written English is
discussion of the structures of English based on a corpus of over 40
million words from both conversation and written texts.  (Unfortunately,
they have no frequency reports on the subjunctive indexed.)

On page 461, they show a distribution of the past perfect and present
perfect in conversation, fiction, news, and academic texts.  In
conversation, the present perfect occurs approximately 6000 times
/million words.  The past perfect less than 800 times.  However, in
fiction, the past perfect occurs more that 6000 times /million words and
the present perfect occurs less than 3500 times /million words. (I am
interpreting a bar graph.)

For evidence of the frequency of the past perfect in fiction, see any of
the Harry Potter books being read by millions of kids in the States.
You will find on almost any page a number of past perfect
constructions.

On page 469 Biber et al. note that the past perfect occurs with time
adverbials in a greater percentage than the simple past tense.  Past
perfect often occurs in dependent clauses.  Finally, these two factors
account for 70% of all occurrences of the past perfect tense.

It is possible that the past perfect may only become a form that occurs
in writing.  This would not be unusual for a language.  Both spoken
French and German rarely use what would be the English equivalent of the
simple past tense.  Especially for French, the simple past is almost
exclusively a written form.

However, I wish I knew the evidence for the claim that the past perfect
is disappearing.  I think that Biber et al. show that in fiction it
isn't.

Bob Yates
Central Missouri State University

However, I sure would like to know the evidence which shows that the
past perfect is disappearing.