It's always a mistake to read about past perfect tense, particularly since there is no past perfect tense in Modern English. Reading about it is wasted time, and it's no wonder you're confused. There's a vast amount of nonsense out there labelled as explanations of zombies like the Past Perfect. — John Lawler5 hours ago
> And this isn't a theoretical problem either. Sweden just issued a ruling that bars the public sector from using Google's cloud services. Meanwhile, India is already telling companies that they need to setup local servers rather than make use of US servers if they want to do business in India.
@Cerberus Pfft. Next, somebody will invent a search engine that keeps track of what things you search for, and what pages you visit from its result list.
> There is some confusion today about the meaning of the first line, which seems archaic to our ears. It is usually given today as "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen", with a comma after the word "merry", so does not refer to "merry gentlemen". "Rest" here denotes "keep or make," with "you" as the object of "rest;" "ye" was the nominative form, and thus was nonstandard as the object of a verb.
> In both of the 18th-century instances, "you" was used instead of "ye," suggesting that the latter may be a modern insertion to make the carol sound more quaintly archaic.
Each is a Quantifier, a part of speech that wasn't discovered until the 19th century, which was too late to get into the Top Eight list, which was canonized much earlier. Quantifiers are a form of Determiner (another POS), and they "bind" noun phrases, which means they modify and quantify them. L...
That’s where the link is.
Haven’t answered that one, though.
@PeterShor No, when John says tense he means single-word inflection, which is why the past perfect cannot be one of his tenses, since it takes more than one word in English (unlike in Latin). Here the auxiliary is in the (simple) past and the main verb itself is in the past participle. He doesn’t seem to believe in synthetic tenses. The problem with banishing it from the tenses is that it remains a construct that people use, and so will need to know how to use correctly. That doesn’t make it non-existent. — tchrist4 hours ago
@Cerb But Lawler says belief does not enter into the matter. :)
> Now is this label "passive perfect" merely a convention? It may have been once, but, as people start believing in it, they start using it in ways that neatly fit the system, even if the meaning of visus sum was once somewhat different.
Synthetic tenses are not a matter of belief. Everything tchrist says about the "past perfect" is true for thousands of other constructions that people use, and so will need to know how to use correctly. Here's a partial list of past "tenses". Why give "past perfect" a special name and special treatment, if you don't do the same for the others? Because Past Perfect is what they told us about in the third grade, so it must be true. They never mentioned the others, so they must not be. — John Lawler43 mins ago
There are thousands of other constructions like the past perfect? I disbelieve.
You can stack up a few auxiliaries and making things like I will have been being seen by that doctor for ten years come next Tuesday, but that only goes so far. It doesn’t add up to “thousands”.
And even that seems unnatural. There are too many words there.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…