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The question was, does Greenbaum say it in a way with which you agree? Do you buy it, all of it, just the way he says it? Just say, "agree" or "don't agree".

 

I am not able to detect your answer to the question.

 

.brad.09apr08. 

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"Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

[This is long and kind of navel-gazing-ish, but this thread strikes me as doing the rhetorical equivalent of what Southerner airplane passengers would call "circling Atlanta".]

Two of the problems that may be involved in this thread are very old ones: definitions come to be mistaken for observations, and observations come to be mistaken for injunctions.

A structural definition for the past perfect is relatively simple -- "had + past participle" -- but there's a lot bound into just that label. By *calling* the form a "past perfect," or (alternately) a "pluperfect," a grammar sets up expectations in readers that may or may not match the actual range of uses of the form. Unless an author tries to use a pure neologism for a label ("This tense will be referred to as 'gemphek' in the text..."), readers will justifiably try to interpret the name the author gives it *literally*. And, of course, no one wants to read a grammar with all new terms for everything. Sapir pointed out exactly this problem in relation to the use of terms like "noun" in  grammars; structuralists at the time maintained that a given word-class in language X couldn't really be "the same" as any word class in language Y -- but they all used terms like "noun" and "verb" when they wrote grammars anyway. I've encountered exactly one attempt at bypassing this -- there was a two- or three-part grammar of Classical Nahuatl that referred to all the word classes by alphanumeric code. It was unreadable.

Recycling terms, or giving things useful names that create some false expectations, is unavoidable. Readers can, however, avoid taking the label as being "true" in some essential sense.

Most readers won't be satisfied with just a structural definition and a label, of course. We all want to know how the darn thing is *used*, and thus most authors of grammars sift through a large number of examples and come up with summary statements based on inferences from the sample. Figures like Quirk and Greenbaum weigh so heavily in discussions like this because they sift through *tons* of material, and make the kinds of summary statements that most of us find useful. But we can't take those summary statements as being, somehow, invested with the  authority to define correctness. A "past perfect" that escaped summary cannot be taken on those grounds as a "bad past perfect." English-speakers do, of course, make judgments about correctness (I just got through explaining to a class for the fourth time that "had went" won't go over well in formal writing), but in the normal course of things, grammars document the judgments, or give weight to one group's judgments over those of other groups, rather than institute the judgments in the first place
(I'm hedging a bit because of Lowth and his ilk).

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University