Re: where do so many tenses come from?
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:24:41 GMT
Steve Mesnick wrote:
Who uses "shall" in that way in the 21st century?
I do, mostly in writing. And I shall continue to do so.
And that's not how the past perfect ("had travelled") is used.
How do *you* use it? What am I missing?
I am about to do a thing in the future. I shall do it in July.
In October, I shall be able to say that I had done it. Or perhaps
you're saying now that in the future I should be able to say that I
should have done it some time in the past?
Were you to choose to elaborate, I should be grateful %^).
You really shouldn't try to use the more elaborate compound tenses
without a full grasp of how the prescriptivists wanted them to be used
early in the last century.
The past perfect is used (as it Latin name, plusquamperfectum, makes
clearer) to refer to past acts within a narrative set in the past:
"When I registered for English 401, I had already taken the
prerequisite, English 302."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.
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