George Bush has been president for 7 years (and still is).
After he's gone, George Bush was president for 8
years.
"George Bush is president", is a sentence.
"George Bush was president", is a sentence.
"George Bush had been president", is not a sentence.
If you think "George Bush had been president", is a sentence, someone tell me what it means.
Elementary (and middle- and high-school teachers, perhaps?) teach children that a sentence expresses a complete thought, but as we have noted on this list many times, such a definition is illogical for the very reason you have pointed out: often—in fact, more often than not—a grammatical “sentence” does not make sense outside the context of other sentences.
Consider a sentence with multiple pronouns: “He gave it to them before he went out there.”
That sentence has no meaning at all unless we know who “he” is, what “it” is, who “them” are, and where “there” is. But if the sentence means “Brad gave the invoice to his clients before he [Brad] went to Nevada ,” then we can argue that it expresses a complete thought—even though we could not understand it out of the context of other sentences.
Nancy
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