Brad Johnston and I just concluded our discussion of the
past perfect. No minds were changed, but he has a lot of interesting
examples drawn from good writing. Since he participated on this list for
a short time, we’ve all had some experience with him, and therein, I
think, lies a useful lesson.
In our frequently unsuccessful and frustrating attempts to
improve grammar instruction and to bring to the literate world a better
grounded sense of what grammar deals with and what it can do, we encounter
people like Brad, intelligent, well informed, well intentioned, and widely read,
but constrained by a social view of grammar that is strict sometimes to the
point of absolutism. Brad rejects any use of “had” that doesn’t
clearly mark an event completed at a point in the past prior to the completion
of some other, related, event. (I’m not sure he’d accept that
definition, but I never did get a complete definition out of him.) At any
rate, he would allow past perfect only in clear, compelling cases of relative
time deixis. The use of “had” to background information in
discourse simply didn’t win any recognition, even though that’s by
far the more common function of it as well as the major source of uses that he
deemed incorrect.
The challenge we face when we bring empirically sound
grammar to the marketplace is not that our audience doesn’t understand
what we’re saying, although that’s not uncommon nor entirely their
fault; it’s rather that they bring a social judgment to grammar that we
tend rather to avoid. Unfortunately, it’s often not the nature of
that social judgment that gets discussed but the specific points of grammar on
which we and they disagree. We do talk about prescriptivism, but that
tends to be a label we apply to those who lack our level of enlightenment in
these matters. It might be a term better dispensed with.
Perhaps the concept of social choice might serve as a bridge
in these discussions. Certainly when we’ve talked about register
and even regional dialect we’ve been talking about social choice, but to
us these are neutral descriptive terms while to those we’re trying to
convince they are value laden, register perhaps less so than dialect.
What we understand as choices of register (“surrender” vs. “give
up”) or of construction (active vs. passive) can be explained, as we have
often done, in a social as well as a textual context.
By the end of our discussion, it was clear that Brad had
made the choice to use simple past in a lot of cases where he would at one time
have used past perfect. Whether we agree with his absolutist approach to
the choice, teaching himself to make the choice made him more aware of what he
was writing and of its meaning. I think he would have done better to
allow a wider range meanings, but I appreciate that he had given (not “gave”)
the matter considerable thought. As teachers, we’ve all experienced
this mixed gratification—of students thinking through a writing choice
and then making their choice perhaps for poor reasons, but at least have
considered alternatives that they might not have without some encouragement.
Sometimes we have to satisfied just to have our students consider their
choices.
Herb