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For example, while it is incorrect to say *I have done it last Friday (the use of last Friday, specifying the past time, would require the simple past rather than the present perfect), there is no such objection to a sentence like "I had done it the previous Friday". [11]
The verb had in the expression had better lacks any untensed form (*Tomorrow you will have better concentrate; *I've had better work hard since I started; *We're having better concentrate) and hence is sometimes classed as a modal idiom, [31] [32] [33] a semi-modal, [97] [98] or an emerging or quasi-modal verb.
"It had to have rained." Es musste geregnet haben. "It must PRET have rained." There is a drastic shift of meaning between these variants: the first sentences denote that it "had been necessary" to rain in the past. The second sentence denotes that the speaker assumed that it had rained.
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.
Many adverbs of frequency, degree, certainty, etc. (such as often, always, almost, probably, and various others such as just) tend to be placed before the verb (they usually have chips), although if there is an auxiliary or other "special verb" (see § Verbs above), then the normal position for such adverbs is after that special verb (or after ...
French expresses past counterfactual conditional sentences in exactly the same way as English does: the if clause uses the had + past participle form, while the then clause uses the would have + past participle form, where the equivalent of would have is the conditional of the auxiliary (avoir or être) used in all perfect constructions for the verb in question.
A run-on sentence is a sentence that consists of two or more independent clauses (i.e. clauses that have not been made dependent through the use of a relative pronoun or a subordinating conjunction) that are joined without appropriate punctuation, the clauses "run on" into confusion, the independent clauses can be "fused", as in "It is nearly ...
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."