Confused Am I with the Past Perfect

[dduck]

Isn't it more natural, i.e. more correct, to simply say:

"I'll give you a ring before you finish writing the memo".?

I don't think you should match correct with natural. There are lots of things to do with language which are correct but not natural, in some people's opinion.

Further, I don't agree that Stephen's example isn't natural. I can imagine saying to a work colleague when there's a deadline to be met. By, using the present perfect you're stressing the precise point in future time. Your example, Harzer, lacks that extra piece of reassurance.

Iain

[john martin]

I look at it this way...

"By the time he had found a parking space, the shop was already closed"

I assume that the "trying to find" a parking space started before the shop "closed", hence the "trying to find" was actually the earlier action.

The same for the unpacking example. I assume the unpacking started before the "getting" there, and so again was the earlier action.

So the order seems to make sense to me! Although seemingly the two "past simple" actions occured after the "past perfect" actions, it could be argued that the past perfect actions began first.

[LarryLatham]

Merry Christmas, guys and girls...

There is so much to be said on this thread, but I am so busy with the holiday season. I think I'll wait until after the holidays to comment.

Meantime, I'll just wish you all a happy and healthy 2004.

Larry Latham

[LarryLatham]

Well, here we are into the New Year. I hope all of you had a peaceful and pleasant holiday season, with lots of good food and good company.

As promised, I’m here to express some ideas that have been brewing in my head during this conversational thread. I hasten to acknowledge that much of my thinking is deeply informed by, if not directly stolen from, a wonderful little volume written about 10 years ago by Michael Lewis called, The English Verb. It has been mentioned several times here on this forum by several different posters, yet it is clear from the content of many posts that there are quite a few teachers around who have, for whatever reasons, not yet had the pleasure of entertaining Mr. Lewis’ ideas. Let me begin here by again urging a reading of this fine piece of work to those who have not. There are, it is true, a few other good references out there about the English verb system, but I must say I’ve not personally come across any others that have the clarity of effect on my thinking that this work has. Not only that, but I’m afraid there are, sad to say, many earlier and more recent books about English verbs which misinform, mislead, oversimplify, overcomplicate, or otherwise do harm to students’ and teachers’ understanding of verb structure. Some of these poorly conceived works have become standard references and are often quoted in places like classrooms and this forum as though they were the last word on the subject. There is no last word. The English language is an ongoing saga that will not be finished in my lifetime, nor in the lifetimes of anyone reading this. It changes continually, but unfortunately, there are at least some teachers who continue to insist that what was proper grammatical use in 1920 or 1950 must also now be preserved as proper use today. Why, I wonder, don’t they invoke the grammar of Shakespeare’s English? I mean why stop in their retrospection at the beginning of the last century?

But I digress, and apologize for the soapboxing. Some of my frustrations are showing.

Perhaps the best place to start is to suggest that we teachers ought to take a lesson from linguists in recognizing that there is a practical and very clarifying difference between tenses and aspects in English verb structure. We often confusingly lump them all together and call the whole bunch by the appellation tenses. We speak of Progressive Tenses, or Perfect Tenses, and try to make comparisons with Simple Tense forms. This is like comparing oranges to grapefruits. It confuses everyone, particularly because there are some superficial similarities. Linguists uncontroversially (within their own field) recognize that there are only two tenses in English: Present Simple Tense and Past Simple Tense. All the others are aspects. The most significant factor involved in the selection of either Present Simple Tense or Past Simple Tense is that despite their names they have nothing whatsoever to do directly with time. It may be counterintuitive, but time and tense are not the same things. Tense is an arbitrary grammatical construct which entails morphology of the basic form of a verb allowing a user to express his interpretation of a certain remoteness, or its opposite, lack of remoteness [Lewis uses the term ‘immediacy’ as the opposite of remoteness, but I prefer simply to say that there is no marking for remoteness] of the event or condition he is describing. Choice between Present Simple Tense and Past Simple Tense is similar in some ways to the thinking involved in choosing to use this or that, and here or there when referring to spatial remoteness. In many cases of actual use, the remoteness referred to when choosing to use Past Simple Tense may be a remoteness of time, but this is accidental. It is not the only kind of remoteness that may prompt users to use that form. For instance, in certain circumstances it is entirely correct and common for a speaker to say, “What did you say your name was?” It even could be, "What was your name?" This does not imply that the speaker believes that your name now might be different than it was when you originally mentioned it (if you did mention it earlier). Suppose she is a hotel clerk asking about the name under which a reservation has been made. Of course, she could as well have chosen to say, “What is your name?” or even, “What did you say your name is?” but she chooses not to. Why? There must be some reason. Speakers do not flip mental coins to choose between equal utterances. There must be something different about the meaning of the candidate utterances that makes choice possible. We’d all soon sink into schizophrenia otherwise. What makes the first choice particular to the situation at hand is that it implies remoteness. “What kind of remoteness?” you might ask. That is part of the task of an active listener to determine. An attentive listener will inquire (of himself), “What could be remote here? It is surely not time. This person is asking my name. It cannot be that her central interest is something I said at an earlier point. Why would she care about that? She surely has every expectation that I haven’t changed my name in the meantime."

A likely possibility here is that she is expressing a representation of her perceived relationship with you: strictly business (= arm’s length—which is to say, remote). It’s not that she’s sending a message that she does not wish to be friendly, but is merely acknowledging that you and she have a business relationship. How many kinds of remoteness are there? I’m not sure I could list all of them, but there is at least remoteness of time, relationship, possibility, and likelihood. An employee who says, “Did you want to see me, boss?” is expressing, I believe, a remoteness of likelihood, and perhaps of relationship as well. He is not sure if the boss wants to see him or not, but we can be certain he is not asking if the boss wanted to see him at some earlier time. What good would it do to ask that? Again, it would be just as possible to say, “Do you want to see me, boss?”, but that is not what is said. The choice implies, as in the earlier example, some sort of remoteness in the estimation of the speaker. We cannot, as listeners, always be sure precisely what is in a speaker’s mind; we only know what he says. The interpretation is up to us, using the clues the speaker provides. It is possible for speakers even to use Past Simple Tense verbs to refer to a future action: “Would you mind if I opened the window?” This speaker is not sure whether you would mind or not. The point here is that choice of Past Simple does not automatically indicate that the action referred to occurs, in the speaker’s view, in past time. There are only two choices of tense: Present Simple or Past Simple. Present Simple is unmarked. It is a simple statement of fact. Period. There is no other marking required, in the speaker’s view. Past Simple is also a statement of fact, but it is marked for remoteness. The kind of remoteness is left for the listener to determine, from several possibilities, including time. Note also, that both tenses always appear as single words; there is no auxiliary in the verb phrase.

Aspect, on the other hand is exactly about time. Different forms imply the speaker’s different interpretations of the temporal elements of the action described. All aspect forms use auxiliaries in the formation of the verb phrase. These forms can be described using time lines on your classroom whiteboards. Tenses cannot. Progressive forms are aspects. So are Perfect forms. They differ fundamentally from tenses in that they are not about the same kind of interpretation by the speaker. So now we get around to the issue of using Past Simple verbs together with Past Perfect Aspects in sentences. It is useless to ask about which action occurs earlier or later as a “rule” of uses of the two forms together. One form states a fact and marks it for remoteness. The other one marks for “perfection”, which, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily mean “finished”. Stephen Jones agrees with this in his post above when he says he wasn’t thinking about Perfect Progressive forms. Evidently, then, perfect does not mean finished. It means that the speaker is taking a retrospective point-of-view. He is looking back in time from some particular point or period of time to the time of the action. On some speaking occasions, that may look quite similar to finished, hence the confusion. Different flavors of perfect forms recognize that a speaker may look back from some past time, from now, or from some future time. All are possible, and all are included in the forms available.

Let’s take, now, Echidna’s examples as he stated in his first post.

“By the time he had found a parking spot, he was already late for the movie.”

“I arrived before she had finished unpacking.”

In the first example, “By the time…” establishes that there is a particular time which the speaker is setting up to be used as a reference point. It is indeed from that moment that the speaker is able to look back upon finding the parking spot. We also know that that time occurs before the moment of speaking because of his choice of form in the perfecting auxiliary, had. The rest of the sentence merely states a remote fact that is relevant to that time: “…he was already late for the movie.” This one is remote in time, because clearly time is an essential element to the understanding of this sentence. We know that because it begins: “By the time…”

The second example contains a remote factual event, “I arrived…” and a retrospective event, “…she had finished unpacking.” It doesn’t matter which comes first in the sentence. “She had finished unpacking before I arrived” works just as well. It is the time of arrival that is used as the vantage point for looking back at the completion of unpacking. But use of the word “before” makes it clear which event takes place first. So here the Past Simple event is the earlier action. Note, however, that the sentence is just as good if it reads:

“I arrived after she had finished unpacking.”

I presume it is clear that the completion of unpacking in this sentence occurs first. So there cannot be a rule designating that a Past Simple event occurs before (or after) a Past Perfect event in a compound sentence.

Sorry for the long answer. I just felt it necessary to explain where I am coming from before answering Echidna’s original question. Please, everyone, what I have said above in this post is not how I believe it should be explained to students. Few of our students would have the necessary background for clearly understanding this rather convoluted explanation. But teachers should know how verbs work, even if they understand them on a different level than they show to their students. I hope this has been helpful to some of you, but I wouldn’t wish it on your classroom charges. I leave it to you to decide how best to work with them.

Larry Latham

[Stephen Jones]

the problem Larry is that you are making the same mistake you accuse others of. You are taking the state of the English language at a particular frozen moment in time, and attempting to make generalizations from it.

Let's take the case of the future tense. It is generally accepted that the future tense does not exist in English, yet the "will + base form" is the equivalent of the future tense in Spanish in nearly every case. Now the future tense in Spanish originally did not exist - you had the verb hablar and the verb he, for example, so you would have "hablar he" which then became "hablaré". The process is called grammaticalization and applies to many other things.

Equally the idea of the past tense reflecting distance misses out the fact that the subjuncitive has become merged in English to the indicative. Many of the examples were the past tense indicates distance are in fact examples where the past tense is in fact the subjunctive, second conditionals being one example.

I beleive the ideas you express are a reasonable description of the state of English at present; I would doubt however if they are any more than a frozen snapshot of present usage. Your comments about the perfect being an aspect and not a tense would be nonsense in French, and difficult to square with Catalan where past actions in the same day are always expressed with the present perfect and not the past simple.

[lolwhites]

And your problem, Steve, is that you make far too close comparisons between English and other languages.

Let's start with the "future". It's true that many (but not all) uses of will+BF coincide with the use of the Spanish future tense, and it's quite right to point this out to Spanish speakers, but that's not the same as saying "will is the English future tense". My French partner has confirmed that the French future tense is not used in the same way as the Spanish one or will+BF, so while your Spanish-speaking students might feel enlightened, you're only going to confuse the French, not to mention those who don't speak an Indo-European language. Using Latin terminology to describe the English language only causes confusion in the long run.

You go on to say "Many of the examples were the past tense indicates distance are in fact examples where the past tense is in fact the subjunctive, second conditionals being one example." So what? Again, it's one thing to say to a Spanish or French speaker "You'd use the subjunctive in your language to say this", but it doesn't help them to talk about the English subjunctive, which pretty much only remains in certain linguistic fossils. Since Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan and Portuguese speakers use the subjunctive in different ways, talk of "the English Subjunctive (Which Looks Like The Past Simple Except For If I Were Or When It's In The Present And Looks The Same As The Infinitive Without To)" will only encourage them to think of English in terms of their own language and lead to more L1 interference. And let's not forget how "helpful" this explanation would be to a Korean, Japanese, Chinese or Turkish speaker....

Finally, you remark that "comments about the perfect being an aspect and not a tense would be nonsense in French, and difficult to square with Catalan where past actions in the same day are always expressed with the present perfect and not the past simple." Why? Are we teaching French or Catalan? Why should English have to "square with Catalan"? Rather, I think such comments help the students to realise that they shouldn't expect a foreign language to look like their own, which will only help them in the long run. Nobody ever became proficient in a foreign language by constantly mapping it onto their own. I know I certainly didn't.

The only solution is to use our own terminology to describe our own language. I don't talk about "Base Forms" when I teach Spanish, nor do I talk about "Subjunctives" or "Future Tenses" when I teach English.

[Stephen Jones]

Which is to go back to the point I was making at the top of the post. That the scheme which Larry suggests, and you and I both use is simply a snapshot of the language at this point in time, and its value lies in how effective it is as a guide for students.

We ought to seriously consider whether we are acheiving anything by informing Spaniards that there is no future tense in English, when we have a construction that works almost the same as there future tense does. At the very least we should tell them that "will2 + base form works as if it were a future tense.

And you may not talk about subjunctives in English but they do exist, particulary in American usage. "If I were you" is an example of the past subjunctive, and "Long Live the Queen2 or "God Bless America" is an example of the present subjunctive.

The "Latin" tense system in fact appears to apply to most Indo-European languages; there is a future indicative in Sinhala for example that appears to mirror most of the uses of will +BF.

I will accept that Lewis's scheme is a fair one for present English usage; however I am exceptionally dubious as to it being anything but an artificail construct.

[LarryLatham]

I must admit, Stephen, though I certainly respect your obvious knowledge of language in general, I don't understand your objections here. Of course I'm offering a snapshot, to use your term, of English as it exists now. What else could I possibly offer? I don't object to current use. My beef is with those who insist that snapshots taken long ago should be taught to students now as if English as currently used is somehow inferior.

I'm afraid, too, that I'll have to take issue with you that will+BF acts as a future tense in English. If that were true, then it would predict all uses of the form as referring to a future event. How, then, would you explain such a construction as:

"I'm sure they'll be there by now."

There cannot be any doubt here that this user is talking about the present moment. Will is a modal auxiliary...not the future tense! There is no future tense! Will may be often used to talk about future time, but it is by no means the exclusive method we have available in English for that. Present Simple verbs will do just fine, for example, in certain circumstances, although it is not the verb form that directs us to the future in these cases, but other constituents of the sentence. The only verb forms that directly link to future time are "(be) going to+BF", which is prospective, and "Future Perfect" forms, which are retrospective. Both of them are aspects, not tenses.

Moreover, while "the subjunctive" may still exist in English, it is fast fading out. "If I was you..." is rapidly becoming normative, in American English at any rate, despite the efforts of teachers (including myself, on this one) to teach "If I were you." We may be forced to give it up before long, at least for the spoken language. Actually, I'm with lolwhites here. I would never mention "subjunctive" or "future tense" in any class. These are dead horses. I might, however, work on "If I were you..." as a lexical item. And "Long live the Queen" or "God bless America" are lexical units without a doubt. Attempts to "analyze" them in any way are pointless.

Michael Lewis' work does not make any pretense of explaining Latin, or Spanish or French. It is meant to explain English verbs, and it does that brilliantly. That's why teachers should buy it...and base their teaching on it...because it works better than any other currently available explanation as far as I can see.

Larry Latham

[Stephen Jones]

I agree that if we are going to be taking snapshots they should be currrent ones, but I am worried that, by ignoring the historical context, we are going for false explanations.

Let's take your idea that tense is distinct from time. Firstly, whilst in English th two words are separate they are not so in other languages ('temps' 'tiempo'). Secondly whilst it is true to say that on occasion the difference between the two is not one of time but one of perceived distance from the action, I fail to see why we put this as the primary distinction, particularly as so many of the examples you can give for that are ones were we are dealing with the merge of the subjunctive and indicative.Why don't we accept that the primary distincition is present versus past, and that the distiinction regarding perceived distance is an extension of that?

Structurally English seems to distinguish between modal auxilairies and others but isn't this because originally in German the modals were full verbs? It seems strange to me that we should accept eight tenses in English (Present/Past Simple, Present/Past Continous, Present/Past Pefect Simple, Present/Perfect Continuous) but deny the name tenses to other constructions that work almost exactly the same as the equivalent tenses do in other languages. And why should we say that "does he play?" is a tense but "will he play?" is not.

Now I teach there are only two tenses in English, Present and Past, and I teach that "will" and "can" are equivalents, and are always followed by one of the four infinitives -- (simple (play), continous (playing), perfect simple (have played) and perfect continous (have been playing). I do this because it is an elegant way of explaining the structure of English, but I am quite aware that it is a didactic grammar, and may not be an adequate descriptive grammar.

To be brief, I believe my reservations are about accepting a schema for descriibing English so radically different from the schema used to describe its close relations, the Germanic and to a lesser extent Romance languages, particularly when in terms of usage English is so close to both. Maybe what we really need is a more adequate way of explaining both English and its near relatives.[/b]

[Stephen Jones]

"I'm sure he's there now"
"I'm sure he'll be there now"

Not the same. Doesn't the second one lay more emphasis on the fact that either he wasn't there before or won't be afterwards?

On another tack it seems to me that we have a large number of meanings we wish to express and a limited number of grammatical tools to do so. And each language has a different set of grammatical tools. Therefore the mapping is different in each language. That is why I keep harping on about the subjunctive. The fact that it has disappeared in English to all intents and purposes means that the past simple (indicative) has taken over roles for which the subjunctive previously would have been the choice.

It seems to me that each grammatical construction carries various assiociations with it, and at the point of choosing the exact utterance we weigh these and decide which is the more appropriate. I believe this also satisfactorially explains shifts in the use of grammatical constructs, and the disappearance of some.

[LarryLatham]

Well, Stephen Jones, I can see that my intuitions about you were correct in the first place. Your knowledge of European languages is indeed impressive to me. Clearly you are better informed there than I am. And some of your concerns about English grammar may be justifiable in the context of other languages with the same Indo-European base.

But I don't share most of your concerns. I have niggles about many of your arguements, but I'm content to pretty much leave it that you and I will have to just agree to disagree. There's nothing wrong with that--I don't demand that everyone accept my proposals as the last word. [I just have to leave you, however, with the suggestion that a good reason for making remoteness the primary distinction of tense, rather than time, is that remoteness can also explain different interpretations of time, but the reverse is not true. Factual remoteness can enfold time. Remoteness is so much more elegant.]

Aside from this, a battle between us in this arena will do neither of us much good, and will certainly bore everyone else to death. So I will conceed that you have raised concerns which might possibly be valid in some contexts, but I don't think have much to do with teaching English here and now.

Besides, I think your superior knowledge of languages might allow you to best me here. I'd be a fool not to recognize that.

Larry Latham

[Stephen Jones]

I agree with you over elegance; it is just that elegance can be deceptive.

I think we are both in agreement about the best didactic grammar, although obviously both of us would modify it if we were teaching a homogeneous foreign language group of students, and we had some knowledge of their first language.

Nevertheless, we should not dismiss other attempts at explanation just because we do not see them as useful for teaching at present. This leads to a cargo cult mentality, and the very use of 'fossilized' or just plain wrong rules, that we have both been complaining about.

[revel]

Hey guys and gals!

UUFF! I am thankful that the past perfect does not become an issue until students are more advanced in their understanding and use of English. Thus the topic becomes a useful debate in class. Finally, if the arguements get out of hand, I can refer my students to this thread of messages and let them try to sort it all out.

Why isn't English like Spanish in this or that aspect of structure or grammar? Well, because English is English and Spanish is Spanish. If they were the same, they would be the same! Why isn't English spelled as it is spoken, for example? Well, because English is like that. Why is "news" singular and "people" plural? (Spanish native language interference here, where the translation is the oposite), well, English is like that.

If the goal is to speak and use English, then these debates are interesting, maybe even necessary, but finally moot, with the students. Among us, I find it very interesting to discuss such things, but those students who look for rules for everything might find a good example in the laws of the land. A group of people write a law. A larger group of people approve this law. It is now a law. Someone breaks the law. What happens to that person is based on the interpretation of the law by a judge or a jury. All rules are open to interpretation and imply their exceptions just by being rules. Only English teachers and linguists talk about the rules, the rest of humanity talks about what they did yesterday or what they will be doing tomorrow!

(sorry for simplifying here, it's cold and my fingers are frozen!)

peace,
revel.

[Stephen Jones]

Dear Revel,
"News" is not singular in English, it is uncountable. And there are very good reasons why English is not spelt phonetically and Spanish is (start with the idea that Spanish is a Latin language and the alphabet is called the Latin alphabet, and then look at the number of vowel phonemes in Spanish and the number in English, and then look at the differing number of vowel phonemes in Standard British English, Standard American English, and standard Canadian English for example, and then remember that English proniounciation has changed significantly at least twice, and you might start to have an idea).

Nobody is suggesting that we should be discussing this with our students. What is important though is that we think about why something happens in English; if we don't do that we will end up sticking to the letter of the law, but ignoring the spirit, to continue your metaphor. This is particularly important when we do not have a universally accepted body of rules, which is the unfortunate case with English grammar.

[LarryLatham]

Yup. I agree with you here Stephen. But I also see Revel's point that unless one is interested in comparative linguistics, debating the differences between English and other languages, however similar or distinct, probably does not advance the art of English teaching. It is often enough to remind students, when they show signs of mapping English onto their native language, that English is different.

But we teachers do need to debate the merits of the "rules." Because while it is true that students do not, it is equally true that they are concerned with the rules. Every teacher knows that. What is confounding is that sometimes the rules printed in grammar textbooks are incomplete, or misleading. Even if they have been used for decades, new discoveries about English use (from work with corpus data, for example) cast doubt on the veracity of some of the rules we feed our students. Some of the rules work part of the time, and that is not enough. Rules which only work part of the time, or even most of the time, but not all the time, unless there is some particular explanation for a particular deviance, are not rules at all. If we can improve them through debate, then we must.

Larry Latham