A full-dress review of the perfect tenses (3)

Let’s continue our full-dress review of the perfect tenses, this time focusing on the past perfect tense. We will do so to clarify the second of three slippery conclusions about the perfect tenses that were presented by Miss Mae, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, in her rejoinder to my column last December 5. Her second conclusion was that the past perfect tense is used “when the action was completed before another action.”

That the past perfect tense is used for an action that was completed before another action is, of course, basically correct, as in “She had left to work in Dubai when her job application for a coveted Manila-based job was accepted.” This is just one of the uses of the past perfect, however. Another use is for a continuing condition that ended in the past with usually only an implicit reference to another past outcome, as in “The dead felon had taken the wrong path.”