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In English grammar, the pluperfect is formed by combining the auxiliary verb had with the past participle of the main verb, as in had jumped or had written, often used in its contracted form ’d, as in I’d jumped. In many cases an ablative absolute phrase, consisting of a noun and perfect participle in the ablative case, may be used in place of a pluperfect for example: Pecuniis mercatori datis, cessit emptor, "When money had been given (more literally: Money having been given) to the merchant, the buyer left."įor detailed information see Latin grammar and Latin conjugation.įurther information: Uses of English verb forms The subjunctive mood is formed similarly (in this case dedisset and data esset respectively). ("Money had been given to the merchant" passive) ("He had given money to the merchant" active) In Latin, the pluperfect ( plus quam perfectum) is formed without an auxiliary verb in the active voice, and with an auxiliary verb plus the perfect passive participle in the passive voice. Modern Greek uses auxiliaries to form the pluperfect examples are given in the table at the end of this article. An example is ἐτεθύκει, "had sacrificed" – compare the perfect τέθυκε, "has sacrificed". The ways in which some languages form the pluperfect are described below.Īncient Greek verbs had a pluperfect form (called ὑπερσυντέλικος, "more than completed"). Some languages, like Latin, make pluperfects purely by inflecting the verb, whereas most modern European languages do so using appropriate auxiliary verbs in combination with past participles. 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.
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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.
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The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed" it contrasts with the "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states.
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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.