Discourse interpretations of the Past Perfect
(a) Duration of states
The continuous Past Perfect expresses the duration of a state up to ‘time then’:
He realized he had left the book he had been reading on his seat in the train.
(b) Modal remoteness
The Past Perfect is similar to the simple past tense in that they can both express modal remoteness. This is not past time, but a hypothetical or counter-factual meaning. This occurs in the complement of the verb wish:
(i) I wish she had told me the truth (She did not tell me the truth).
AmE sometimes prefers the form would instead of the Past Perfect:
I wish she would have told me the truth. This is ungrammatical in BrE.
The other use is the counterfactual conditional:
(ii) If only they had realized a hurricane was imminent, they might have run to safety (They did not realize).
In hypothetical conditional sentences such as this, the past perfect can occur only in the conditional (if-clause), not in the main clause. A further variant is as follows:
Had Britain been involved from the start as even the French wanted, the EEC, eventually the EC, would have developed differently. (A History of Modern Britain)
(c) Backshift in reporting
The third function that the past perfect shares with the past tense is that of backshift when the reporting verb is in the past. This may be a verb of perception:
One could see he had aged considerably.
Sheila said they had had a puncture and would probably be late.
d) Stressed had
The past perfect auxiliary had is often stressed in speech when the speaker is referring to a previous situation that no longer holds:
We had planned to go to the New Delhi conference, but we’ve had to give up the idea.
As the Past Perfect refers to a time previous to a time signalled somewhere else in the context, it is not always easy to determine its time reference. For this reason, the Past Perfect often occurs in subordinate clauses accompanied by time Adjuncts, both of which help to establish the temporal links between events. The following extract from Raymond Carver illustrates uses of the Past Perfect:
It was just past six o’clock. Myers hadn’t slept since he’d boarded the train in Milan at eleven the night before. When the train had left Milan, he’d considered himself lucky to have the compartment to himself. He kept the light on and looked at guidebooks. He read things he wished he’d read before he’d been to the place they were about. He discovered much that he should have seen and done. In a way, he was sorry to be finding out certain things about the country now, just as he was leaving Italy behind after his first and, no doubt, last visit.
