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Past Perfect Tense

The past perfect tense refers to an action that occurred before another past action. It is formed using the past tense of the verb "have" (had) plus the past participle of the main verb. The past perfect tense is used to indicate that one past action was completed before another occurred. It can also be used when reporting past actions or to express conditional statements with "if" clauses. To make the past perfect tense negative, "not" or the contraction "hadn't" is added after "had".

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85 views

Past Perfect Tense

The past perfect tense refers to an action that occurred before another past action. It is formed using the past tense of the verb "have" (had) plus the past participle of the main verb. The past perfect tense is used to indicate that one past action was completed before another occurred. It can also be used when reporting past actions or to express conditional statements with "if" clauses. To make the past perfect tense negative, "not" or the contraction "hadn't" is added after "had".

Uploaded by

Fela Zain
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is 

past perfect tense?
When we want to express actions or states of being we use words
called verbs. When it comes to English verbs, we use many different verb
tenses in our sentences. The tense of the verb, generally speaking, tells you
when in time an action or state happens. In the case of past perfect tense, it
tells us that an event happened in the past before another event in the past. 
For example, the sentence Daniel had left by the time Erica got to his
house uses the past perfect tense to say that Daniel left his house before
Erica arrived. Both of these actions happened in the past, but one of them
happened before the other.
If we break apart the name of this verb tense, we can see it is telling us how to
use it:

1. Past: The verb tense refers to an action or state that occurred before


now.
2. Perfect: Generally speaking, perfect verb tenses refer to completed
states/actions. In the case of past perfect tense, we often refer to an
action/state that was totally completed before another one.
There’s a lot more to say about the simple past tense than you might
think. Read more about it here.
When do you use perfect past tense?
One of the main reasons that we use the past perfect tense, also called
the pluperfect tense, is to indicate  that a past action or state happened before
another past action or state. You can see examples of this in the following
sentences:
 I had caught ten fish before my dad caught one.
 When we found our dog, he had gotten stuck in a fence.
 She didn’t eat any of the stew because she had already eaten a big
lunch.
All of these sentences use different constructions, but in all three the clause
that uses the past perfect tense describes an action that happened earlier in
time than the clause that uses the simple past tense.
Sometimes, the event that an action or state is being compared to isn’t always
explicitly stated. For example:

 With a quick glance, I could tell that the teenagers had visited the store.
In this sentence, the action described with the past perfect tense isn’t being
compared to another past action that is specifically mentioned in the
sentence. However, the context of the sentence implies that the teenagers
visited the store before I did or before I arrived at the store.
Another common reason that we use the past perfect tense is when stating
information that was said or reported by someone. The following sentences
give examples of the past perfect tense used this way:

 Nick told me that Marta had visited him this morning.


 She said I had taken a wrong turn.
 They claimed the cat had broken the vase.
The “someone” can even be yourself as in I thought I had fed the hamsters
already, but I guess I was wrong.
We also often use the past perfect tense to express conditional statements.
These sentences typically use the word if. For example:
 If I had studied harder, I’d have passed this test.
 If my dad had asked for directions, we wouldn’t have gotten lost.
 We could have avoided this mess if you had just told the truth.
How to form past perfect tense
The past perfect tense is formed by using the word had followed by the past
participle of the verb. For regular verbs, the past participle is a form of the
verb that ends in -ed or -d. For example, the past participle
of watch is watched. Some verbs also use a –t variant, where the past
participle ends with -t instead of -ed. For example, the past participle
of learn is learnt and the past participle of leap is leapt.
However, there are many irregular verbs whose past participles do not follow
this rule. For these verbs, there are no general rules regarding their past
participles and you will simply need to learn them or look them up in our
amazing dictionary. Here are some examples of irregular verbs:
 be → been
 eat → eaten
 wake → woken
 saw → seen
 catch → caught
 do → done
 think → thought
Here are examples of sentences using the past perfect tense with regular and
irregular verbs:

 I had just finished my breakfast when Zach knocked on the door.


 When the detective arrived, the police had already built a perimeter
around the crime scene.
 She swore that a creepy statue had been in the hallway just a moment
ago.
We can shorten our sentences using contractions:
 He’d started a new painting when I entered the studio.
 Before we could even ask, they’d already gotten us refills.
Count on us to clear up questions you have on many other grammar
topics as well, including countable nouns.
How to make past perfect tense negative
In order to make past perfect tense negative, we just put the word not after the
word had. The contraction hadn’t can also be used. Here are examples of the
past perfect tense used in the negative:
 He told me he had not ever been to Italy before.
 He told me he hadn’t ever been to Italy before.
 She scowled at me and I hadn’t even said anything.
 She scowled at me and I had not even said anything.
 The mall hadn’t been open five minutes before it was packed with
Christmas shoppers.
 The mall had not been open five minutes before it was packed with
Christmas shoppers.
 I don’t think my parents believed us when we said we had not
shaved the dog.
 I don’t think my parents believed us when we said we hadn’t shaved the
dog.

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