Janet,
You have two uses of the past perfect in your example, neither of which our resident past perfect shaman would like, since they are not clearly triggered within the same sentence. (I should be very careful about defining his terms since he does tend to react with verbal violence to such attempts.) I would regard "had forgotten" as triggered by your time perspective when you wrote or uttered the sentence, that, for example, you had forgotten prior to his having reminded you. The second use "had asked" I find more interesting. It's a little harder to find a trigger for, although not impossible, but it reads more like an increasingly common use of the past perfect to mean a remote past. Not a past event prior to an reference past event, but rather a past time that is more remote than the time one would normally use a simple past tense for. This use has sometimes been criticized as characterizing younger, inexperienced writers. I don't think you're an inexperienced writer, and so I conclude that the use of past perfect forms to represent remote past meanings is becoming a part of at least informal standard English. Lots of other languages make the same distinction, of course.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Dews-Alexander [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: February 6, 2009 3:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Past perfect
Janet,
Although grammatically standard in form (from my perspective), I suppose in a technical sense the usage could be considered non-standard. I know my ESL students would be confused because they would expect another clause in the simple past to follow, such as, "I had forgotten that you had asked me to send you the new rubric until your picture jogged my memory." Without a clause in the simple past, it may seem unnecessary to use the past perfect perhaps partly due to the fact that it's self-evident that the "forget" and "ask" actions are complete since you're now sending the email.
However, as a native speaker of English, I would not be confused by your usage; to me it would in fact convey an emphasis on the sense of completion that comes along with the perfect aspect. The fact that you "had forgotten" highlights the implication that you now remember. You haven't forgotten the person. That's just my interpretation though.
I, too, have been more keenly aware of the past perfect when I encounter it due to all the (sometimes nonconstructive) talk about it on this list. So, perhaps I can find a silver lining in those exhausting threads!
Regards,
John Alexander
On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Castilleja, Janet <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hello
I sent this message to a colleague today:
I had forgotten that you had asked me to send you the new Eng 99B IWA rubric. Here you are!
I'm only posting it to see if it makes anyone's head explode. The use seems defensible to me, since both actions seem (to me anyway) to have taken place overtime in the past and also to have been completed in the past. Every time I use the past perfect now (as in the previous sentence), it jumps out at me.
Janet
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