Questions tagged [past-perfect]
Questions about Past Perfect tense
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What is the name for the form of the word "been" in the Past Perfect Continuous?
In the Past Perfect Continuous what is the name of the form of the word "been"?
For example, I had made a form table like this:
Subject
aux verb
verb -ing form
I, she, he, it, you, we, ...
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Can Past Perfect Continuous tense be used to say that something continued beyond the specified event if we don't even use the duration?
Reference: In the book 'Advanced Grammar in Use by Martin Hewings' on page no. 14 it is written that 'The past perfect continuous can be used to talk about a situation or activity that went on before ...
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How can the preterite in the second clause place its event BEFORE that of the past perfect’s event in the first clause?
Here the chronology seems inverted as regards to the proper use of the past
perfect and the preterite to order two different events that both occurred
in the past:
He had not been[past perfect] happy ...
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Can "hence" be used to refer to time forward relative a past event in the context of the past event (moving from past perfect to simple past)?
There is a good discussion here (Referring to past times with "hence") that concludes that hence can't be used like "ago" to refer to a past event, not even to describe how much ...
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Using Past Perfect Simple/Continuous during another event in the past described in Past Simple?
I've been working through a grammar book "English for Everyone - English Grammar Guide" and I've stumbled upon some sentences regarding usage of Past Perfect that I can't wrap my head around....
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Is it wrong to place the duration of an activity before the place where that activity was held? (Consider the following example)
Can we say:
"Before I became a singer, I had been a hall monitor for almost five years at the Stuart Little Elementary School for the Musically Inclined Children."
Instead of:
"Before I ...
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Incorrect use of 'had' in this past perfect tense
I saw this fill in the blanks question in my exam:
Before we ___ our meal, he ___ us back to work.
There were four options to this question:
finished, had ordered
have finished, ordered
had ...
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He died after he was ill for a long time
(14) He died after he had been ill for a long time.
(15) She told me his name after he had left.
In a 1989 paper titled "Perfect and pluperfect: What is the relationship?", Raphael Salkie ...
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Use of Past Perfect if an interlocutor doesn't know about a moment in the past
We use Past Perfect to speak about actions before some moment in the past.
What if my speaking partner doesn't know about a moment in the past?
I had done everything.
(I don't mention it, but in ...
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They hadn't finished playing by 10.30. / They didn't finish playing by 10.30 [closed]
They hadn't finished playing by 10.30.
They didn't finish playing by 10.30.
I have my own explanation what the difference is. Could you please agree or disagree with it?
Past perfect helps us to say ...
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Infinitives of purpose with the past perfect [closed]
In the sentence:
"There were people everywhere. They thronged the streets, choking the
alleys. They had come in their thousands to see the light show"
I would group the infinitive of ...
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1
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Correct usage of 'had' [closed]
I was recently studying a paragraph in which I came across a sentence, which was below:
The British king, Charles I, had inherited a very difficult financial situation from his father.
However, I ...
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Meaning of the sentence "The thieves had run away when the police arrived."
This is from the Quirk's CGEL section 4.24 - The past perfective:
Adverbials of time position, when used with the past perfective, can
identify either T2 or T3. Placed initially, they often identify ...
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Past perfect when the action is separated from the present by facts that are common knowledge to the speakers but not mentioned
Page 59 of Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference reads:
There is a tense in French which is formed like the English past
perfect, and its usage corresponds generally to the English tense....
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Using the structure "by + time expression + past perfect" to describe a graph
Is the structure "by + time expression + past perfect" suitable for describing a graph regarding an event that we cannot exclusively say that it had happened before the specified time ...
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