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.