I usually don’t respond to Brad’s past perfect posts, but once in a while he asks a question worth considering.  In his latest post he provides a list of past perfects from the BYU Corpus that he contends are incorrect and asks if there is another rule involved.  There is.  Let’s take just one of his examples.

The Treasury Department figures showed it soared to $82.7 billion. Economists <had predicted> predicted a number closer to $30 billion.

The status of the information in the second sentence changes when the verb is changed from past perfect to simple past.  The foregrounded information is in the first sentence, and the second sentence is background.  If the simple past is used in the second sentence it is no longer clear what the status of the information is.

In addition to the time referring function that Brad recognizes, the past perfect also has a discourse function that it shares with other aspectual verb structures, including the present perfect and the progressive.  To take a simple case, and one that other members have commented on recently, the compound tenses contrast in narrative discourse with the simple tenses.  Narrative writers use simple past and simple present to move the action forward, and they use perfect and progressive aspects to provide background information.  Here’s an example from Salinger’s Nine Stories.

I remember a significant incident that occurred just a day or two after Bobby and I arrived in New York.  I was standing up in a very crowded Lexington Avenue bus, holding on to the enamel pole near the driver’s seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap behind me.  For a number of blocks the driver had repeatedly given those of us bunched up near the front door a curt order to “step to the rear of the vehicle.”  Some of us had tried to oblige him.  Some of us hadn’t.  At length, with a red light in his favor, the harassed man swung around in his seat and looked up at me, just behind him.  At nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not particularly clean, Continental-type pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of forehead.  He addressed me in a lowered, an almost prudent tone of voice.  “All right, buddy,” he said, “let’s move it.”  It was the “buddy,” I think, that did it.  Without even bothering to bend over a little--that is, to keep the conversation at least as private as he’d kept it—I informed him, in French, that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and that he’d never know how much I detested him.  Then, rather elated, I stepped to the rear of the vehicle.

Salinger, J. D.  1953.  Nine Stories.  New York:   Bantam Books.  P. 130.

In this passage I’ve put the verbs with aspectual auxiliaries in bold, and the clauses that carry the narrative forward in italics.  I’ve included in boldface two participial phrases; like aspectual auxiliaries they are used to provide background information.  There are four instances of past perfect, and the first four could be replaced with simple pasts.  However, the narrative would then change.  Giving the curt order, obliging, and not obliging would then all become foregrounded and would be part of the narrative line.  Clearly, that would weaken the narrative, and Salinger is a better writer than that, so he chose to background those pieces of information.  The past perfect in this passage functions to provide background information rather than to specify a particular time reference, although it does that as well.

It’s impossible to discuss background, foregrounding, and narrative line and the grammatical structures they use when dealing with a single sentence.  These a discourse functions and require coherent passages to show how they are expressed.

It is, by the way, an interesting and instructive exercise to have students find passages and apply this sort of analysis to them to distinguish backgrounding and foregrounding.

Herb

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.

Emeritus Professor of English

Ball State University

Muncie, IN  47306

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