Answer: Unpacking Past Perfect

[superhero-specs.livejournal.com]

earth2skye asked: When is the past perfect tense used?

With examples from Stargate SG-1, House, Harry Potter and Firefly.



Form
First, let's look at what "past perfect tense" is.

The past perfect tense is formed by a past tense of "to have" and a past participle. Usually it looks like this:

had + verb-ed

For example:

Jack had talked to Carter about the mission just that morning.

But the following are all also past perfect tense:

House had just lost his entire team, and Cuddy still wouldn't get off his back.

"Well," said Ron. "It would have been nice if you had asked us before you ran off to be all heroic."

Daniel's papers might have been saved if Jack had thought to warn him just thirty seconds earlier.

Carter had been working on the device all morning, but by lunchtime she still didn't even know what was wrong with it.

Maybe Simon had never been poor, but he had known desperation.

(In the fourth example above, notice that "had been working" is different from the "had + past participle" construction. This is past perfect progressive, which indicates a continuous action—rather than a completed action—in the past of the past.)



Function
Now, when is the correct time to use the past perfect tense?

The past perfect tense indicates an action completed earlier than some other past time*. I think of it as indicating the "past of the past." It can be used in present tense narrative, but I find it most useful in past tense narrative (using "she went" and "he said" rather than "she goes" and "he says"). You can use it to establish backstory, for example, by referring to things that happened before your story.

House had always found Cuddy attractive, but now that he had a chance to do something about it, he found himself curiously uninterested.

There had been that one fling with that one guy in college, but they had had sex only the once. Daniel considered himself to be straight.

If your narrative is in present tense, you can do these things with plain old past tense:

House always found Cuddy attractive, but now that he has a chance to do something about it, he finds himself curiously uninterested.

There was that one fling with that one guy in college, but they had sex only the once. Daniel considers himself to be straight.

Don't shy away from the "had had" construction. If someone had had something that he didn't have anymore, say so.

Inara had had no problem keeping her feelings professional—so long as Mal didn't have sex with anyone else, either.

Ron had had a perfectly nice life before he met Harry: no money, no respect from his brothers, no chance of being exceptional or distinguished, but at least everyone he loved was alive and well.

That's really all there is to it. Past perfect tense can feel complicated, usually because it's just difficult to keep track of all the "degrees" of pastness. But it's really very straightforward. If something happened and finished happening before a certain time in the past, use the past perfect. An event in a given period of time of the past is past tense; past perfect is used for anything that happened in a time previous to that.


Resources:
EnglishPage.com
*Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft

Comments

[earth2skye.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for answering my question! And forgive me for this but since this has been bugging me for a while, I have a sort of addendum:

Just to be sure, since your answer was so short and to the point, I take it that--grammatically--there are no exceptions to this rule are there? 'Cause I've read that, if you have a whole lot of back story to tell (like a paragraph or more), you could get away with just starting the paragraph(s) with past perfect but then switiching to past tense; just so that it doesn't read so slowly and awkwardly with all those "had"s...

Thank you very much again!

[superhero-specs.livejournal.com]

Well, at that point it becomes a stylistic issue more than a grammatical one. If you have a long section of backstory, it might make sense to introduce it with a sentence or two in past perfect, then continue in past tense. It's not a "should" or a "must," but it is frequently more natural to do it that way. Think of if you were doing it verbally. You're going along telling a story about yesterday, and you realize you need to establish a previous fact: "He had never been on a roller coaster before. Well, technically he had, but he couldn't remember it. See, his parents took him to Coney Island when he was about two and a half..."

There's a natural place to switch from past perfect to past: it's when you realize that you're going to actually move your primary story-telling time frame into an entirely new time (when he was two, instead of yesterday) so that you can tell a whole story there.

Thanks for the specific question. Maybe I'll see if I can fit a note about it into the main entry.