There’s a formality issue involved as well (apologies if
this point has already been raised; I’m doing quick catch-up). Native
speakers don’t use the past perfect much in ordinary speech, but formal
writing encourages it in the “event occurring before another past event”
situation. “John was angry because his application was turned down”
would strike very few as odd in spoken English, or as dialogue in a novel. If
it occurred in a scholarly paper I was asked to look over, I’d suggest
shifting to past perfect in the subordinate clause.
That is, however, quite different from saying one version
is somehow existentially wrong. At least part of the reason that grammar texts
traditionally harped on the past perfect so much may be that Latin, or to an
even greater extent, Greek, was viewed as an ideal, and so people thought that
the strict sequence-of-tenses rules for those languages should exist in English
as well. I’m not even sure Greek writers stuck to the “rules,”
frankly, but I would have to do a lot of background checking before saying that
confidently.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Cynthia
Baird
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 12:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Layton - so it makes no difference?
As a high school English teacher, I would not teach my
students that these two sentences are identical.
I try to help my students use the perfect tense when they
discussing two events in the same sentence and a more precise relationship
between these two events needs to be conveyed. If I say "john was
angry because his application was turned" I can only place both
events squarely in the past, occurring simultaneously for all I know. But
if I say "john was angry because his application had been turned
down" I more clearly understand that the rejection of the application
occurred in the past prior to the anger.
That's my take on this, anyway.
Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]> wrote: