We will take up today a very instructive question raised by a professor in Ontario, Canada, about the opening sentence of my column that came out on New Year’s Day 2007 (
“The importance of grammar-perfect English – I”). The sentence in question: “To get our English usage lessons off to a lively start in 2007, let’s dissect some of the most jaw-dropping grammar gaffes I had come across during the year that has just ended.”
Regarding my use of “had come across” in that sentence, Prof. Brett Reynolds of the English Language Centre of the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning asked: “Why did you use the past perfect here? Standard English would call for the simple past. Present perfect would be fine if you were to write ‘during this past year’. But the past perfect?”
Here’s my open reply to Prof. Reynolds:
Dear Brett:
Your question got me thinking very deeply if I had indeed committed an error in my grammar. Should I have used the simple past form “I
came across during the year that has just ended” instead of the past perfect “I
had come across during the year that has just ended”?
To put things in their proper timeline, I’d like to make it clear that I wrote that column specifically for a January 1 dateline. I was talking to my readers during those very moments when the old year was turning into the new. I was therefore not in a position yet to view events in 2006 in the manner you suggest: that they had taken place at various times “during this past year.”
I was never in doubt that my use of the present perfect “has just ended” in reference to 2006 was grammatically aboveboard. This, after all, is what the present perfect is all about: a verb tense that expresses an action or state completed at the time of speaking. And, as in the case of “during this past year,” using “during the year that just ended” would have been semantically problematic as well. Although grammatically correct, that phrase—without the verb auxiliary “has”—would have conveyed the wrong sense that the year ended abruptly, as if it were a capricious being that could, in fact, end any which way it pleases.
Still, Brett, you have a point in questioning my use of “had come across” in that sentence instead of “came across.” Before discussing the matter, though, let me clarify first that I used “had come across” not as a stand-alone verb phrase but as an integral part of the relative clause “(that) I had come across during the year that has just ended,” the whole of which modified the noun “gaffes.” But since it happened that I came up with an elliptical construction that dropped the conjunction “that,” the clause took this semantically baffling form: “…let’s dissect some of the most jaw-dropping grammar gaffes I came across during the year that has just ended.”
This elliptical form of the clause created a serious semantic problem. Without the conjunction “that,” it wasn’t clear anymore that “I came across during the year that has just ended” was a relative clause that contained another relative clause. Worse, it gave the impression that the speaker was “giving over something demanded” or “coming through with something.”* What I wanted to convey, of course, was “to chance upon,” and to come up with this meaning I decided to preface “come across” with the verbal auxiliary “had.” I think you’ll agree with me that “had come across” did convey the meaning “chanced upon” better, but as you have pointed out, it’s also clear that it had led me to an inappropriate use of the past perfect.
So, Brett, as grammar-perfect as I can make it, here again is that clause: “let’s dissect some of the most jaw-dropping grammar gaffes
that I came across during the year that has just ended.” (2007)
This essay, 522nd in the series, first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times
in its February 5, 2007 issue, © 2007 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.The Manila Times
ran one column on “The importance of grammar-perfect English” series each week for seven weeks in 2006, and my Facebook Gateway to the Forum is now running one of them every three days in succession on February 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21, 2017 for the benefit of new Forum members and English learners. *COMPANION READING. Deciding precisely when to keep or knock off “that” admittedly isn’t simply a touch-and-go affair. It needs a fine ear for language and lots of practice before being mastered, and it can cause confusion when done incautiously as what happened in this case. I explained the workings of the ellipted “that” in a two-part essay in my English-usage column of The Manila Times for its October 11 and 18, 2004 issues. As a refresher for those who still feel queasy about this usage, I later posted that two-part essay in the Forum on July 3, 2010. I strongly recommend it as a companion reading for this grammar refresher: “Getting a better handle on when to use or to just knock off ‘that’”(Next:
The importance of grammar-perfect English – VI (February 21, 2017)
