|
The pluperfect is a type of verb form, traditionally treated as one of the tenses of certain languages, used in referring to something that occurred earlier than the time being considered, when the time being considered is already in the past. The meaning of the pluperfect is equivalent to that of English verb forms such as "(we) had arrived" or "(they) had written". The word derives from the Latin ''plus quam perfectum'', "more than perfect" – the Latin perfect refers to something that occurred in the past, while the pluperfect refers to something that occurred "more" (further) in the past than the perfect. In English grammar, the equivalent of the pluperfect (a form such as "had written") is now often called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a ''past perfect progressive'' (or ''past perfect continuous'') form: "had been writing". ==Meaning of the pluperfect== The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense; in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with grammatical aspect; namely past tense (reference to past time) and perfect aspect (state of being completed). It is used to refer to an occurrence that was already in the past (completed) at a past time. Bernard Comrie classifies the pluperfect as an ''absolute-relative tense'', because it absolutely (not by context) establishes a deixis (the past event) and places the action relative to the deixis (before it).〔Comrie, Bernard, ''Tense'', Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 64.〕... Examples of the English pluperfect (past perfect) are found in the following sentence (from Viktor Frankl's ''Man's Search for Meaning''): *A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely. Here, "had thought" and "had reached" are examples of the pluperfect. They refer to an event (a man thinking he has reached the limit of his capacity to suffer), which takes place before another event (the man finding that his capacity to suffer has no limit), that is itself a past event, referred to using the past tense (''found''). The pluperfect is needed to make it clear that the first event (the thinking and the supposed reaching) is placed even earlier in the past. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「pluperfect」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|