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