Brad Johnston and I just concluded our discussion of the past perfect.
No minds were changed, but he has a lot of interesting examples drawn
from good writing.  Since he participated on this list for a short time,
we've all had some experience with him, and therein, I think, lies a
useful lesson.  

 

In our frequently unsuccessful and frustrating attempts to improve
grammar instruction and to bring to the literate world a better grounded
sense of what grammar deals with and what it can do, we encounter people
like Brad, intelligent, well informed, well intentioned, and widely
read, but constrained by a social view of grammar that is strict
sometimes to the point of absolutism.  Brad rejects any use of "had"
that doesn't clearly mark an event completed at a point in the past
prior to the completion of some other, related, event.  (I'm not sure
he'd accept that definition, but I never did get a complete definition
out of him.)  At any rate, he would allow past perfect only in clear,
compelling cases of relative time deixis.  The use of "had" to
background information in discourse simply didn't win any recognition,
even though that's by far the more common function of it as well as the
major source of uses that he deemed incorrect.  

 

The challenge we face when we bring empirically sound grammar to the
marketplace is not that our audience doesn't understand what we're
saying, although that's not uncommon nor entirely their fault; it's
rather that they bring a social judgment to grammar that we tend rather
to avoid.  Unfortunately, it's often not the nature of that social
judgment that gets discussed but the specific points of grammar on which
we and they disagree.  We do talk about prescriptivism, but that tends
to be a label we apply to those who lack our level of enlightenment in
these matters.  It might be a term better dispensed with.  

 

Perhaps the concept of social choice might serve as a bridge in these
discussions.  Certainly when we've talked about register and even
regional dialect we've been talking about social choice, but to us these
are neutral descriptive terms while to those we're trying to convince
they are value laden, register perhaps less so than dialect.  What we
understand as choices of register ("surrender" vs. "give up") or of
construction (active vs. passive) can be explained, as we have often
done, in a social as well as a textual context.

 

By the end of our discussion, it was clear that Brad had made the choice
to use simple past in a lot of cases where he would at one time have
used past perfect.  Whether we agree with his absolutist approach to the
choice, teaching himself to make the choice made him more aware of what
he was writing and of its meaning.  I think he would have done better to
allow a wider range meanings, but I appreciate that he had given (not
"gave") the matter considerable thought.  As teachers, we've all
experienced this mixed gratification-of students thinking through a
writing choice and then making their choice perhaps for poor reasons,
but at least have considered alternatives that they might not have
without some encouragement.  Sometimes we have to satisfied just to have
our students consider their choices.

 

Herb


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