"Tom spent his summer weekends at his lake cottage that he built in 1995."
 
Tom built the cottage.

 
"Tom spent his summer weekends at his lake cottage that he had built in 1995."
 
Someone else built the cottage for him.
 
The sentence is from "Sleeping Beauty", by Phillip Margolin, who wrote it with 'had' in front of 'built' but probably didn't mean it the second way above, since he is inclined to put 'had' in front of verbs that cannot be read a different way when 'had' is removed, i.e., he puts 'had' in front of past tense verbs, lots of them.
 
.brad.07jun10.


      

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