ATEG Folks--
New voice here (<not a sentence).
Years ago, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, someone argued that while a double negative yields a positive, a double positive does not yield a negative. Sidney Hook, notorious for being a wise guy, hooted from the back row, "Yeah, sure."
I guess if we want to say that "Colin had been a spy" is not a sentence because the past perfect is used only contextually in a sequence indicating a time before a time, then we need to define "sentence" in a way that satisfies such a distinction.
Consider the following sequence: "Mary worried about her new lover. Colin had been a spy. Could he be trusted?" If Brad Johnston is correct, then "Colin had been a spy" is a fragment, and as such, it must be punctuated as part of a sentence containing a simple past time. The sequence should therefore read, "Mary worried about her new lover: Colin had been a spy. Could he be trusted?"
I tend to agree with Brad Johnston that such handling of the past perfect is preferable to grammatically separating that tense from the simple past, yet I would have to say also that identifying "Colin had been a spy" as a fragment is putting too fine a limit on what constitutes a sentence.
John Holt
Centenary College of NJ
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Brad Johnston
Sent: Sat 8/23/2008 9:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: further to the A-train
This is from my archives, in chronological order from top to bottom, and probably explains the outburst from Wilmington last week.
.brad.23aug08.
~~~~~~~~~
From: Brad Johnston [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">http:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
To: Veit, Richard [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">http:[log in to unmask]>
"Discovering English Grammar", by Richard Veit, c.1999.
page 181 - The gamblers had been cheating Sam.
page 183 - Colin had been a spy.
page 187 - Melanie & Frederick had not been wasting any time.
page 208 - The actors had performed a play by Shakespeare.
page 211 - Gamblers had waged large bets on the game.
page 213 - What had been decided?
page 216 - Had the plumbers fixed the leak?
This is Exhibit #81 to my assertion that there is at least one past perfect error on any online grammar website or in any grammar text you can name. All of the above "sentences" are not sentences. They give the appearance of being sentences because they begin with a capital letter and end with a period or a question mark.
But they are "fragments" (or whatever other name you want to give non-sentences) because they use the past perfect form for the verb but have no timing sequence either indicated or compelled by context. Standing alone, they are not sentences. Note that there are 15 or 20 times as many examples in the book, so the error rate is small. But I only guarantee "at least one".
The error in four of them is that they violate the rule that the past tense of the verb "to be" is "was" (singular) or "were" (plural), not "had been".
The other three put the word 'had' in front of what is necessarily, given the lack of compelling context, a past tense verb.
.brad.23apr08.
~~~~~~~~~
"Veit, Richard" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It is a big surprise to me to learn that these are not sentences.
On reflection, I am prepared to concede that these are not sentences in Bradlish, a language similar to English but with some idiosyncratic rules set by Brad, but I suspect that they really are sentences in English, a language spoken by a billion or so other people. I'm guessing that most native English-speakers would say they were English sentences, even if the world's most eminent Bradlish-speaker says they aren't sentences in his language.
I am flattered by Brad's going through my grammar textbook so thoroughly and offering a critique.
Dick
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
~~~~~~~~~
Dick,
1.) What do these words mean?
Colin had been a spy.
2.) What do these words mean?
Colin was a spy.
.brad.23apr08.
~~~~~~~~~
He did not reply.
I think some of you should pay attention because some of you are having trouble identifying past tense verbs. If you don't know one when you see one, how are you going to teach your students something they need to know?
Consider this reply to the ten A-train sentences, which you all saw: "I think either one would be okay--some I would say one way and some the other, but I don't think one is more correct than the other".
Dick Veit thinks I'm harping but as long as we get such a statement from a grammar teacher, I think it's fair to say, with all due respect, that there are people out there who either don't recognize past tense verbs or who believe that a past tense verb can be made into a past perfect verb by putting the word 'had' in front of it.
If we say that "one is no more correct than the other", the student will reasonably be persuaded that so long as we think we know what is meant, ya know, nuthin' else don't matter none.
.brad.23aug08.
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