[This is long and kind of navel-gazing-ish, but this thread strikes me
as doing the rhetorical equivalent of what Southerner airplane
passengers would call "circling Atlanta".] 

Two of the problems that may be involved in this thread are  very old
ones: definitions come to be mistaken for observations, and observations
come to be mistaken for injunctions. 

A structural definition for the past perfect is relatively simple --
"had + past participle" -- but there's a lot bound into just that label.
By *calling* the form a "past perfect," or (alternately) a "pluperfect,"
a grammar sets up expectations in readers that may or may not match the
actual range of uses of the form. Unless an author tries to use a pure
neologism for a label ("This tense will be referred to as 'gemphek' in
the text..."), readers will justifiably try to interpret the name the
author gives it *literally*. And, of course, no one wants to read a
grammar with all new terms for everything. Sapir pointed out exactly
this problem in relation to the use of terms like "noun" in grammars;
structuralists at the time maintained that a given word-class in
language X couldn't really be "the same" as any word class in language Y
-- but they all used terms like "noun" and "verb" when they wrote
grammars anyway. I've encountered exactly one attempt at bypassing this
-- there was a two- or three-part grammar of Classical Nahuatl that
referred to all the word classes by alphanumeric code. It was
unreadable. 

Recycling terms, or giving things useful names that create some false
expectations, is unavoidable. Readers can, however, avoid taking the
label as being "true" in some essential sense.

Most readers won't be satisfied with just a structural definition and a
label, of course. We all want to know how the darn thing is *used*, and
thus most authors of grammars sift through a large number of examples
and come up with summary statements based on inferences from the sample.
Figures like Quirk and Greenbaum weigh so heavily in discussions like
this because they sift through *tons* of material, and make the kinds of
summary statements that most of us find useful. But we can't take those
summary statements as being, somehow, invested with the authority to
define correctness. A "past perfect" that escaped summary cannot be
taken on those grounds as a "bad past perfect." English-speakers do, of
course, make judgments about correctness (I just got through explaining
to a class for the fourth time that "had went" won't go over well in
formal writing), but in the normal course of things, grammars document
the judgments, or give weight to one group's judgments over those of
other groups, rather than institute the judgments in the first place
(I'm hedging a bit because of Lowth and his ilk). 


Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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