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In English grammar, the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (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".
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see".
The auxiliary may be a verb meaning have (as in the English I have won) or a verb meaning be (as in the French je suis arrivé(e), "I (have) arrived", literally "I am arrived"). The have -perfect developed from a construction where the verb meaning have denoted possession , and the past participle was an adjective modifying the object , as in I ...
French has numerous forms of the past tense including but not limited to: Past perfective (passé composé) e.g. J'ai mangé (I ate or I have eaten, using the form but usually not the meaning of I have eaten) Past imperfective (imparfait) e.g. Je mangeais (I was eating) Past historic or Simple past (passé simple) e.g. Je mangeai (I ate ...
If you had written (not: would have written), it would have put my mind at rest. However, some varieties of English regularly use would (contracted to 'd) and would have (' d have) in counterfactual condition clauses, although this is often considered non-standard: If you'd leave (standard: you left) now, you'd be on time.
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
In most cases, either one is possible, as shown in (2) above, but when the relative item is the subject of the relative clause, there is a gap in the subject position, and bare relatives are not possible (e.g., these are the folks that __ have been helping, but not *these are the folks __ have been helping.) Traditional grammar calls that a ...