The pluperfect is needed to make it clear that the first event (the thinking and the supposed reaching) is placed even earlier in the past. They refer to an event (a man thinking he has reached the limit of his capacity to suffer), which takes place before another event (the man finding that his capacity to suffer has no limit), that is itself a past event, referred to using the past tense ( found). Here, "had thought" and "had reached" are examples of the pluperfect. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely.Įxamples of the English pluperfect (past perfect) are found in the following sentence (from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning): "It had already been raining for a week when the big storm started.").īernard Comrie classifies the pluperfect as an absolute-relative tense, because it absolutely (not by context) establishes a deixis (the past event) and places the action relative to the deixis (before it). It is used to refer to an occurrence that at a past time had already been started (but not necessarily completed), (e.g. The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with grammatical aspect namely past tense (reference to past time) and perfect aspect (state of being completed). (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous) form: "had been writing".
"had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed" it contrasts with the "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states. The word derives from the Latin plus quam perfectum, "more than perfect". Examples in English are: "we had arrived" "they had written". The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time in the past.
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.
0 kommentar(er)
