Standard use of used to or not?

[shuntang]

I prefer to use a paragraph of sentences to explain Pluperfect (=Past Perfect), as I believe tenses are used to tell the time relations between actions. And yet I think I can't add anything new here.

The Foundation of Past Perfect and past continuous

In telling a story, the writer is presumed to have known the whole story, and normally he will describe actions in sequence:
Ex: “He came near a village. A farmer talked to him. He went into the village.” (please excuse my short sentences.)
== In this circumstance let's call the flow of actions is orderly or smooth (CAME and then TALKED and then WENT).

Only when the flow is broken does the writer use signal to remind readers. He uses Past Perfect or Past Continuous Tense:
Ex: "He came near a village. He went into it. A farmer had talked to him about a resting place."
== Here is the point, every action in a story is compared with, and according to, its precedent sentence. TALK happens before GO but puts behind it, therefore the flow is broken. We call this retrospection, looking back to another action. In describing a story, the writer has to use a special tense to remind readers of it. As we can see, the order or the flow of actions is important in choosing tenses.

However, the action in subordinate clause is different:
Ex: “He came near a village. Before he went into it he talked to a farmer.”
== Action in the subordinate GO is compared to its main action TALK, rather than to its precedent action COME.

The point can be clearer if we use after-clause:
Ex: “He came near a village. After he had talked to a farmer he went into it.”
== TALK in the subordinate indicates a case before the main action GO, not before its precedent action COME. But the point still is, HAD TALKED is used not because of the action following.

In regard to subordinate clause, however, it compares only to the main clause and remains the same tense no matter it is placed before or after:
Ex: “He came near a village. After he had talked to a farmer he went into it.”
Ex: “He came near a village. He went into it after he had talked to a farmer.”

It is easy to notice that, at the beginning of a paragraph, where the writer wants to indicate it happens prior to the precedent paragraph, he starts with Past Perfect for the first sentence, and then in the next sentence go back to Simple Past promptly because he has to anticipate another retrospection, which would call for Past Perfect again. In other words, if "had used to" is at the beginning of a paragraph, then it happens earlier than the paragraph preceding.

Both Past Perfect and Past Continuous are retrospective, indicating a disruption of the flow of actions. In a smooth flow of actions, there shouldn’t be past continuous:
Ex1: “He came near a village. A farmer talked to him. ?He was going into it.” (=Not ok)
Ex2: “He came near a village. A farmer greeted and talked to him. They were going into it together.”
== In Ex2, Past Continuous indicates GO happens before TALK (not GREET) and together with TALK.

=============
Therefore, I guess that before "had used to", there must be another Simple Past sentence happened later than it, or "had used to" is in the subordinate clause. In the very short, "had used to" is a retrospection.

I searched for "had used to" and there were many such examples at the first resulting page:

Ex: This was an adaptation of a technique that researchers Kong-Peng Lam and Klaus Rajewski had used to study lymphoid cells, but it had not been applied to cancer modeling,” said Orkin.

Ex: In Pittsburgh last month, several visiting St. John's University basketball players were cleared of a rape accusation after one team member gave investigators his cell phone, which he had used to videotape some of the encounter.

Ex: An article by Christensen and Suess published in Byte magazine described CBBS and outlined the technology they had used to develop it, sparking the creation of many tens of thousands of BBSes all over the world.
== All the "had used to" here are in the subordination, happening before its main action.

Note: Passive voice structures and negative sentences are not normal 'action' and thus sometimes don't get into tenses comparison.

Shun Tang

[LarryLatham]

Let me hasten to say, Andy, that no one is attacking you here. You have already proved yourself several times over in this forum. You have everyone's respect, and attacking you would be silly. We know you are in the "descriptionist" club. And that that does not preclude having 'rules' for English. It does mean that the best rules describe how English speakers do make language, not how they should.

Mohamed Shaaban reminded us here that one of the beautiful things about English is that users can manipulate it rather flexibly to support their particular meaning, even when that meaning may be quite unusual. This means to me that a form like had used to will have its purpose from time to time.

Larry Latham

[shuntang]

But think Metal, people use the past perfect to say what happened before something else that happened in the past. You are essentially trying to talk about something that happened before the past perfect.

How to retrospect something happened before the Past Perfect? This is an interesting question asked by many. If you have watched over some fictions you may easily notice that authors use another paragraph, new paragraph, to bypass this situation.

Shun

[Ed]

Looks like I missed a lot yesterday.

I'll just add a few points:

In relation to "defective" forms (Andrew already explained it), used to is defective precisely because it does not have the other inflections.

It's logical to expect it to be "the past of something", but that does not exclude the possibility of an incomplete paradigm. Interestingly, my students come up with "I use to get up early" meaning "I usually get up early". If we have used to, why not use to? Well, just because that is the way our language works.

Anyway, if someone wrote had used to, and the form is interpretable, we may as well accept it as part of that writer's freedom.

[LarryLatham]

Anyway, if someone wrote had used to, and the form is interpretable, we may as well accept it as part of that writer's freedom.

Everyone! Read this quote three times to infuse it into your mind. There is great wisdom here. Ed must be 95 years old!

But I don't like the term "defective" applied to used to. I am sure someone much smarter than I am must have decided it applied, and printed it in some book, but I still don't like it. It implies that there is something 'wrong' with used to, as if it was subnormal or broken. It isn't either. It works just fine in the uses for which it was intended. The fact that it has no logical interpretation for present or future time events does not make it defective. There are other words which usually do not occur in certain forms precisely because the intrinsic meaning precludes it. These words are not defective, they are full of meaning. And my hat is off to speakers and writers who can figure out inventive ways to exploit that meaning.

Larry Latham

[Ed]

You made me laugh, Larry. In fact, I'm not even 50 yet.

I can see why you dislike the term defective, but it is just part of the jargon we use:

From Merriam-Webster Online:

Defective (among other meanings): lacking one or more of the usual forms of grammatical inflection.

Another example of a defective verb given in Radford's Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English is beware.

[LarryLatham]

Thanks, Ed. I knew there are words like this, and just didn't know there was a term for them. Now that I know there is, I don't like it any better than I did before you informed me it was "official jargon".

I'd sure like to meet some of the people who have provided us with the official jargon of English grammar and syntax. I have a piece of my mind I'd like to give them.

Larry Latham

[metal56]

Excellent! So "used to" can act like the past perfect.

But think Metal, people use the past perfect to say what happened before something else that happened in the past. You are essentially trying to talk about something that happened before the past perfect.

I don't know how you reached that conclusion. I said that it is not always the case that "had" is included in past before past sentences. It is sometimes ellipted, yet recoverable.

[metal56]

But I don't like the term "defective" applied to used to. I am sure someone much smarter than I am must have decided it applied, and printed it in some book, but I still don't like it. It implies that there is something 'wrong' with used to, as if it was subnormal or broken. It isn't either. It works just fine in the uses for which it was intended.

Exactly! What folks are not seeing is that the, so called, past simple form of the verb is defective in that is isn't fully suitable when referring to a past fact. That form can be used in many other time references.

"Used to" is far from defective, it is unique in that it is ONLY used to refer to factual past time or before now time events.


I came here a lot when I was a child.
I used to come here a lot when I was a child.
I would come here a lot when I was a child.

Even the modal "would" there can be used in other time references and is non-factual to boot.

See how other references of time and non-factuality are used by the past tense form and the modal:

I would be happy if you came next week.

[shuntang]

See how other references of time and non-factuality are used by the past tense form and the modal:

I would be happy if you came next week.

In other forum, most readers (EFLs) agreed that such kind of subjunctive structures is not used by us anymore. This kind of structures is not wrong, but nearly extinct, they said. Is it true or not?

[LarryLatham]

Not.

Larry Latham

[Stephen Jones]

We would be very happy, Shuntang, if you took Larry's word on this.

[metal56]

See how other references of time and non-factuality are used by the past tense form and the modal:

I would be happy if you came next week.

In other forum, most readers (EFLs) agreed that such kind of subjunctive structures is not used by us anymore. This kind of structures is not wrong, but nearly extinct, they said. Is it true or not?

Not!

Give 'em this one:

I would tell you the answer if I knew. (past tense used for future time)

[Ed]

What they have said elsewhere (I think I know the forum Shun Tang is talking about) is that in "If I knew", "knew" is not the past tense. It just looks like it, but it is actually a subjunctive (now almost lost in English inflection). Remainders of the subjunctive are forms like "It is necessary that you be on time" and the like.

Maybe Shun Tang is thinking of a case like "If I were...", which is now just as good as "If I was..." (descriptively speaking), and may eventually disappear.

For those of you who know Spanish, a language with a full subjunctive mood, different from the indicative, the equivalent of "If I knew" is "Si supiera" (while "I knew" is "(Yo) sabía" or "supe" --but that is another problem).

[metal56]

I guess it all depends on what one means by "Tense".