English Language & Usage Asked on June 28, 2021
As an English teacher, I often find students unclear about the use of the past perfect. It seems that this is sometimes optional if there is a time reference. I take both these sentences to be correct and mean the same:
Until I went to the Tower of London, I didn’t believe in ghosts.
Until I went to the Tower of London, I hadn’t believed in ghosts.
However, in these two examples, I don’t believe they mean the same:
Until I went to London, I didn’t eat sausages.
Until I went to London, I hadn’t eaten sausages.
The first being a habitual act, or decision not to eat sausages; the second the absence of sausage eating during the speaker’s lifetime, perhaps due to a lack of sausage-eating opportunities.
So, my questions are, can the past perfect be substituted by the past simple plus a time reference (or conjunction) only when a state verb is involved?
Are there any ‘rules'(which time phrases or conjunctions can be used, for example)? I’m sure my students would be keen to know!
Many thanks.
Peter.
It really has nothing to do with stative verbs. Stative verbs can't be put in the past perfect continuous without a change in meaning. The problem has to do with how the past perfect is a catch-all tense.
The purpose of the past perfect is to indicate a sequence of events. It offers clarity as to which of two events happened prior to the other event when both events happened in the past. With the exception of conditional statements, that's the extent of its purpose. We have the option to use the simple past with reference to both past events when the sequence of events is obvious from the sentence. This most commonly happens when we include time elements; however, we can still use the past perfect if we wish.
The problem is that we have no way of indicating the "tense granularity" of the event we have placed in the past perfect. This is not only a problem here, but also in direct/indirect speech and narrative tenses since both the simple past, the past perfect, and the present perfect all degrade in these cases to the past perfect.
In the case that we need to give more information, we have to make the sentence more robust or, more likely, provide additional context.
Answered by Fred Hockney on June 28, 2021
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