the past perfect tense in English

to form the past perfect tense use the helping verb add and the main verb is in the form of a past participle we use the past perfect tense when there are two past actions one action happens before another the action that happens before another action is the one that uses the past perfect tense where you're using the helping verb add and the past participle the past participle is the main verb in order to use the past perfect you have to know the difference among the simple form of the verb the past tense form of a verb and the past participle take for instance the verb go go is the simple form the task hence is went and the past participle is gone you several people walked into the theater after the movie had already started there are two past actions here and here have started we put the word already between this helping verb and the main verb and the past perfect tense indicates what happened first in the past so the movie started here and then this action walked happens after this if you don't use the past perfect tense here several people walked into the theater after the movie started that's okay but to be clear if you're using the past perfect that definitely indicates which action happened first in the past it had rained for several days before the flooding began here's the past perfect tense on the timeline this is what happens first so it rained several days and then the flooding began you can also begin the sentence with their work before before the flooding began it had rained for several days so it doesn't matter too much which way you begin the sentence the past perfect tense indicates what happened first in time so I still know that this happened before the flooding began if you start a sentence like this make sure you put the comma at the end this is an example of a complex sentence before the flooding began is the dependent clause in the main part of the sentence which includes the past perfect tense this is the independent clause you can make the helping verb had- by adding a contraction had plus not becomes hadn't they hadn't finished their work on time they hadn't finished their work on time I could say they didn't finish their work on time but for some reason I want to use the past perfect and here it's negative in some sentences that use the past perfect tense there's only one verb in the past perfect for example she had never been to a store that large well here's the past perfect its negative and implied here is some action that did not take place in the past so on a time line this is now this is a pass and at this point here this is when she went to the store up to this point she had never been to a store that large after this point whenever this happened this is no longer true she had been to the store and so the situation has changed the past perfect times is often used with negative words so in this example he had never worked so hard in his life this indicates that up to some point in his life this is the past this is also the past but up to this point in the past this was true but something happened right here where he worked extremely hard and the circumstances leading up to this changed the past perfect tense indicates that something has changed or something is very different from the past you

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Published: Thu Apr 13 2017