| 词组 | plupluperfect |
| 释义 | plupluperfect English abounds in surprising constructions. Various observers have commented on the fact that in speech the ordinary past tense (ate) often replaces the present perfect tense (have eaten) or the pluperfect or past perfect tense (had eaten). And we find other observers commenting on the fact that the pluperfect is—in speech again—often supplied with an extra auxiliary (had have eaten). A correspondent of the magazine English Today named Ian Watson wrote in April 1986 commenting on this use, which he dubbed plupluperfect. He quoted a British politician named Jim Prior who used the plupluperfect in a radio interview: • If I had've been there Subsequent correspondence in the same magazine showed that the construction was by no means new, having been traced by historical grammarians to the 15th century. The OED under have, definition 26, notes that in the 15th and 16th centuries there are many instances of a superfluous had or have in compound tenses. The editors give several examples, of which the most recent is dated 1768. The present-day version of the construction seems usually to show have as the extra auxiliary. In speech this have tends to be unstressed and reduced, and in written representations of speech it comes out spelled 've, a, or of: "if I had've been," "if I hadda been," "if I had of been." We have already seen an example of've. Paul Christophersen in English Today, October 1986, gives these examples of a: • ... if we'd a left the blame tools at the dead tree we'd a got the money —Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, 1876 • If we'd a-known that before, we'd not a-started out with you so early —John Galsworthy, Strife, 1909 We have these examples spelled of: • "It was four o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the blinds we'd of seen daylight." —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925 • "The army ain't got none like mine," says Daley. "I guess they wished they had of had...." —Ring Lardner, The Big Town, 1921 (The contraction -'d in the examples from Twain, Galsworthy, and Fitzgerald makes it impossible to be sure that these are not, rather, examples of would have and so not the true plupluperfect.) Partridge 1942 points out that the construction is by no means confined to the illiterate, although the fictional examples presented so far are surely intended for characters of little education. Partridge cites an unnamed novel in which an educated character has these musings: • "But then ... should I have been any more understanding if I hadn't have happened to have been there that afternoon " And Christophersen gives an example from a 1976 English examination paper: • If the two had have been married, Criseyde would not have had to be exchanged for Antenor. The construction would have to be judged nonstandard in ordinary written discourse, but we have no evidence that it ever occurs there, at least in the edited varieties. Christophersen's article in English Today gives a historical account of the construction and two explanations of its origin that have been put forward. No one is really certain how the construction arose, and no one seems to have advanced a theory to account for its use. In its modern manifestation the plupluperfect seems to occur in the conditional clause of a hypothetical or counter-factual statement, so it may be related to the limitations of the modern subjunctive which, except for the verb be, is unmarked for tenses of past time. This construction, and the similar one with would, may simply represent an attempt by the speaker to impose a subjunctive marker on the standard past perfect. So we have, on the one hand, a tendency to replace the pluperfect with the simple past and, on the other, a tendency to emphasize the pluperfect with an extra auxiliary or even to create a sort of pluperfect subjunctive. Who said English was plain and simple? |
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