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Past perfect |
Those perfect tenses keep coming – this time it's the past perfect. Let's look at a few example sentences. |
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| A) When I arrived at the party, John had gone home. / Mark had finished when Phil arrived. / They had eaten their dinner when the waiter brought the bill. |
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In the sentences above there are two actions that happened in the past but the underlined action occurred before the other action (which is in the past simple). We could say the earlier of two actions that happened in the past. |
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To form the past perfect we use the following components: |
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| Subject |
auxiliary verb - had |
V3 |
| John |
had |
gone (before I came). |
| Mark |
had |
finished (before I started). |
| They |
had |
eaten (before I arrived). |
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Past perfect continuous |
Another combination of multiple parts – past + perfect + continuous. Certainly a mouthful but let's see what we've got here. |
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Let's look at some example sentences: |
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| A)
He'd been running for 2 hours when he collapsed. / They had been playing football for an hour when the lights failed. |
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Again we've got two actions that happened in the past but this time one of them (the underlined one) continued for a period of time and occurred before the other one. |
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If we look at the underlined parts of the example sentences, we get the following: |
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| Subject |
auxiliary verb - had |
V3 verb to be |
verb+ing |
| He |
had |
been |
running. |
| They |
had |
been |
playing. |
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