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The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we had arrived " before the game began; "they had been writing " when the bell rang.
An English pluperfect tense is sometimes appropriate for translating this Latin tense: Atreī fīliī, quī Pelope nātus fuit (Cicero) [217] 'sons of Atreus, who (himself) was born (had been born) from Pelops' In the following examples, the double perfect refers to a situation which existed a long time earlier, before Ovid was exiled:
The pluperfect tense (Greek ὑπερσυντέλικος (hupersuntélikos) "more than completed"), like the Imperfect, is used only in the indicative mood. It refers to a situation that existed due to events that had taken place at an earlier time: [89]
Virgil has a short i for both tenses; Horace uses both forms for both tenses; Ovid uses both forms for the future perfect, but a long i in the perfect subjunctive. [10] The -v-of the perfect active tenses sometimes drops out, especially in the pluperfect subjunctive: amāssem for amāvissem. Forms such as amārat and amāstī are also found.
The pluperfect and future perfect forms combine perfect aspect with past and future tense respectively. This analysis is reflected more explicitly in the terminology commonly used in modern English grammars, which refer to present perfect , past perfect and future perfect (as well as some other constructions such as conditional perfect ).
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
The three perfect tenses (Perfect, Future Perfect, and Pluperfect) are formed using the perfect participle together with part of the verb sum 'I am'. The ending of the participle changes according to the gender and number of the subject: captus est 'he or it was captured'; capta est 'she or it was captured'; captī sunt 'they were captured ...
Common tenses of this type are the pluperfect and the future perfect. These both place the situation in the past relative to the reference point (they are anterior tenses), but in addition they place the reference point in the past and in the future, respectively, relative to the time of speaking. For example, "John had left" implies that the ...