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

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