A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

50 Chapter 3 Verbs, tense, aspect, and mood

6.2 The preterite perfect

In §5.2 we distinguished three main uses ofthe preterite, and all three of

them are found in the preterite perfect, i.e., the construction where the perfect aux­

iliary is in the preterite form had:

[44] She had gone to bed. [past time]

[modal remoteness]

[backshift]

ii It would have been better if she had gone to bed.

iii Yo u said she had gone to bed.

The central use of the preterite is to indicate past time, and when the preterite

combines with the perfect we then have two components of past time. So in [i]

her going to bed is located in the past relative to some other past time - such as

the time of our arrival in She had already gone to bed when we arrived.

In [44ii] the preterite indicates not past time but modal remoteness. In this exam­

ple the conditional has a counterfactual interpretation: she didn't go to bed.

Because the preterite is marking modal remoteness, it can't also indicate past

time, so the perfect has to be used for this purpose. (Compare the non-perfect

It would be better if she went to bed, where the time is the immediate future, not

the past.)

For [44iii], a natural context would be to report you as having said She went

to bed or She has gone to bed. Here the preterite or the present perfect of the orig­

inal utterance is backshifted to a preterite perfect.

6.3 The perfect in clauses without primary tense

The third case to consider is where auxiliary have appears in a second­
ary form, so that there is no primary (inflectional) tense. The perfect in this case
serves to locate the situation in past time, just like the preterite in clauses that do
have primary tense. Compare the following pairs:

[45] PRIMARY TENSE: PRETERITE

a. We believe that she was in Bonn

at the time.

II a. As we reached agreement yesterday,

we don 't need to meet today.

NO PRIMARY TENSE: PERFECT

b. We believe her to have been in Bonn

at the time.

b. Having reached agreement yesterday,

we don 't need to meet today.

In each pair, there is reference to past time in both [a] and [b]. The past time is
expressed by the preterite in [a] and the perfect in [b].
Examples like these show why we refer to the preterite as the primary past tense
and the perfect as the secondary one. The preterite represents the most common, or
default, way of locating the situation in past time, but it can't be used in clauses
without inflectional tense, such as the non-finite clauses in [45ib/iib]: the perfect is
then called into service to perform the job that in the [a] examples is performed by
the preterite. The same point applies to examples like [44ii] above. As we noted, this