Herb,

Thank you. I'm glad you think something I pulled from the BYU Corpus is worth 
considering. I thank you, again, for bringing that corpus to my attention. 


The response I most want from you is a reply to any one of the several recent 
emails in which I asked you to please tell me what the past perfect is. "Show me 
what you would write on the board if a student asked you what it is. Your 
answer needs to be crisp enough that they can copy it in their notebooks and 
carry it out the door when the bell rings."

You waxed melodic in a variety of different ways and down a variety of different 
paths but I still need to know, to make what you say below make sense, what is 
the past perfect? How can any of us consider your thoughts on the Salinger quote 
without knowing your answer to that simple question?

What is it?

.brad.11feb11.


________________________________
From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, February 11, 2011 1:24:22 AM
Subject: On meanings of the past perfect


I usually don’t respond to Brad’s past perfect posts, but once in a while he 
asks a question worth considering.  In his latest post he provides a list of 
past perfects from the BYU Corpus that he contends are incorrect and asks if 
there is another rule involved.  There is.  Let’s take just one of his examples.
 
The Treasury Department figures showed it soared to $82.7 billion. Economists 
<had predicted> predicted a number closer to $30 billion.
 
The status of the information in the second sentence changes when the verb is 
changed from past perfect to simple past.  The foregrounded information is in 
the first sentence, and the second sentence is background.  If the simple past 
is used in the second sentence it is no longer clear what the status of the 
information is.
 
In addition to the time referring function that Brad recognizes, the past 
perfect also has a discourse function that it shares with other aspectual verb 
structures, including the present perfect and the progressive.  To take a simple 
case, and one that other members have commented on recently, the compound tenses 
contrast in narrative discourse with the simple tenses.  Narrative writers use 
simple past and simple present to move the action forward, and they use perfect 
and progressive aspects to provide background information.  Here’s an example 
from Salinger’s Nine Stories.
 
I remember a significant incident that occurred just a day or two after Bobby 
and I arrived in New York.  I was standing up in a very crowded Lexington Avenue 
bus, holding on to the enamel pole near the driver’s seat, buttocks to buttocks 
with the chap behind me.  For a number of blocks the driverhad repeatedly given 
those of us bunched up near the front door a curt order to “step to the rear of 
the vehicle.”  Some of us had tried to oblige him.  Some of us hadn’t.  At 
length, with a red light in his favor, the harassed man swung around in his seat 
and looked up at me, just behind him.  At nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a 
flat, black, not particularly clean, Continental-type pompadour over a badly 
broken-out inch of forehead.  He addressed me in a lowered, an almost prudent 
tone of voice.  “All right, buddy,” he said, “let’s move it.”  It was the 
“buddy,” I think, that did it.  Without even bothering to bend over a 
little--that is, to keep the conversation at least as private as he’d kept it—I 
informed him, in French, that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and 
that he’d never know how much I detested him.  Then, rather elated, I stepped to 
the rear of the vehicle.
Salinger, J. D.  1953.  Nine Stories.  New York:   Bantam Books.  P. 130.
 
In this passage I’ve put the verbs with aspectual auxiliaries in bold, and the 
clauses that carry the narrative forward in italics.  I’ve included in boldface 
two participial phrases; like aspectual auxiliaries they are used to provide 
background information.  There are four instances of past perfect, and the first 
four could be replaced with simple pasts.  However, the narrative would then 
change.  Giving the curt order, obliging, and not obliging would then all become 
foregrounded and would be part of the narrative line.  Clearly, that would 
weaken the narrative, and Salinger is a better writer than that, so he chose to 
background those pieces of information.  The past perfect in this passage 
functions to provide background information rather than to specify a particular 
time reference, although it does that as well.
 
It’s impossible to discuss background, foregrounding, and narrative line and the 
grammatical structures they use when dealing with a single sentence.  These a 
discourse functions and require coherent passages to show how they are 
expressed.
 
It is, by the way, an interesting and instructive exercise to have students find 
passages and apply this sort of analysis to them to distinguish backgrounding 
and foregrounding.
 
Herb 


      

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