Meaning
A past tense is one that has a reference time period that occurred before the present moment. A perfect tense specifies that the verb took place prior to the designated reference time period. Therefore, for a context of some past time period, a Past Perfect verb takes place even before that past reference point.
For instance, Dinah tells you about a dinner party she threw on Tuesday. She spent all afternoon getting her apartment ready and preparing all the food. “Thankfully, baking the cookies was a breeze,” she says, “since I had already made the dough on Monday and had refrigerated it overnight; so on Tuesday I simply placed the chilled cookies in the oven!” The context of the story is Tuesday (so she uses the Past Simple for ‘placed’), but since preparing the cookies happened a day before the context, she uses the Past Perfect for ‘had made’ and ‘had refrigerated’.
Structure
HAD + Perfect Participle
For the Past Perfect tense, the verb string needs to have the past form of the auxiliary verb HAVE: ‘had’. The verb that immediately follows ‘had’ should be in the Perfect Participle form, and in most cases that would be the main verb. For the vast majority of verbs, the word should end with -ed. But for irregular verbs, there may be a different transformation to the Perfect Participle form, such as a vowel shift, and -en suffix, both, or some other change.
- eg: “I had forgotten the password.”
- eg: “You had already left the party.”
- eg: “He had promised to call later.”
Notice that the form of HAVE is ‘had’ regardless of the subject that precedes it. Next, consider some structural variations, for which the changes are reflected only in the role of the auxiliary verb:
- eg: “I hadn’t forgotten the password.” ← as negative
- eg: “Had you already left the party?” ← as a question
- eg: “He‘d promised to call later.” ← in contracted form
Featured Adverbials
The Past Perfect tense is often accompanied by adverbs that give more information about the time (either when the action took place or the duration). The same adverbs that tend to be used with the Present Perfect tense can be used for Past Perfect as well, but the most common ones are: ‘already’, ‘ever’, ‘just’, ‘never’, ‘recently’, ‘still (not)’, and ‘(not) yet’.
Past Perfect clauses might also feature prepositional phrases that serve the role of adverbs (that is, they modify the verb). Common prepositions for this tense include ‘for’ and ‘since’.
Usage
Past Narratives
The Past Perfect tense is perhaps most frequently used in narratives. When the context is some past time frame, most of the verbs will be in the Past Simple or Past Continuous tenses. But there may be situations that reference a verb that happened even before the time of the story, for which a Past Perfect (or Past Perfect Continuous) tense may be more suitable.
Explanations & Backstories
Unless the story takes place at the beginning of time, the elements of the story are likely affected by what came before. Who left the enigmatic letter on the table? Why does the romantic interest have emotional baggage? When was the abandoned village last inhabited? If questions like these are answered in a few sentences or less — perhaps interrupting the events of the main story — they are typically expressed in Past Perfect.
For instance, “I hadn’t heard from her in years,” references a substantial period of time in which an action did not happen. But more importantly: it implies that, as of the moment this sentence references, the speaker didn’t know what their friend was up to, or didn’t consider her a friend any longer, or was surprised by an unexpected visit. The circumstances of the moment were explained in light of what had happened (or not happened) previously.
Reflecting Back
The Past Perfect might be used in Content Clauses after cognitive verbs like ‘acknowledged’, ‘discovered’, ‘forgot’, ‘found out’, ‘realized’, or ‘remembered’, as in the example, “The doctor then remembered that the patient had cancelled the appointment.”
Backshifted Past
Sometimes the Past Perfect form is used for either a Past Simple or Present Perfect meaning, but the verb has been backshifted. Backshifting is a process applied to Reported Speech and to the Unreal Mood.
- The sentence “I went to the grocery store already,” might later be relayed through Reported Speech as “She said she had gone to the grocery store already.”
- While “I knew about the problem,” is an indicative expression, an equivalent Unreal Mood expression might be “If only I had known about the problem,” which might be used for Past Conditionals or Regrets.
Advanced Concepts
Complex Verb Strings
A Present Perfect verb might also be Continuous, Passive, modal, or any combination of those. In such cases, the verb string appears more complex. Take these examples:
- “She might have made a mistake.” ← with modal verb
- “She has been making many mistakes.” ← also a Continuous tense
- “She might have been making a mistake.” ← Perfect, Continuous, and modal
- “A mistake has been made.” ← in Passive Voice
- “A mistake might have been made.” ← Perfect, Passive, and modal
While this looks more complicated — and indeed there are more factors to consider in these examples — both the form and the meaning remain consistent with the fundamental Present Perfect tense. Regarding the form:
- In all cases, some present form of the verb HAVE is in the sentence.
- Whichever verb immediately follows HAVE is in the Perfect Participle form. In most cases, this would be the main verb (‘made’). However, in Continuous tenses, the subsequent verb is the auxiliary BE, which then takes on the Perfect Participle form of ‘been’.
Regarding the meaning, it is always in case that make began in the past for these examples, but the mistake is still relevant to the current moment. What changes is whether the situation was only theoretical, whether the action of making is still ongoing, and whether ‘mistake’ is the subject of the sentence.
with Modals
Modal Verbs have their own way of denoting past tense. Most of them (for the epistemic and deontic flavors) have a ‘perfect modal’ form which includes the auxiliary ‘have’. This perfect ‘have’ supersedes the ‘had’ of Past Perfect tenses. Therefore, a Past Perfect verb with modality would look something like “I must have forgotten the password,” not “I must had forgotten the password.” This form is then indistinguishable from the Present Perfect tense with modality, but often the context will make the timing of the verb clear.
Pluperfect
This tense is sometimes referred to as ‘Pluperfect’ by linguists, especially when it applies to languages other than English.
Teaching Tips
Super Past
We often think of ‘past’ as a binary term: either a tense is past, or it is not past, right? For some learners, the idea that one verb might be ‘more past’ than another can seem odd at first. In our experience, we have used terms like ‘super-past’, ‘double-past’, or ‘past-of-the-past’ (usually asking the class which makes the most sense to them) to distinguish between the contextual past and a time period before that when the Past Perfect verb takes place. This is not helpful for every learner, so you may need to select your terminology on a class-by-class basis.
Revisit Present Perfect
The perfect aspect is the same in both Present Perfect and Past Perfect. The core difference between these two tenses is whether the context has a time frame in the current moment or at some past time period. Recalling that perfect means the verb began earlier but is still relevant to the specified time period should help, since it applies to all perfect tenses.
The Perfect Participle
The more popular term for the Perfect Participle is the ‘Past Participle’, but that term can be misleading since it can work with past, present or future tenses, and since a tense can be past without this participle. We strongly suggest consistently using the term ‘Perfect Participle’ instead, as it applies to every variation of perfect tenses.
For more advanced learners, it may be beneficial to point out other topics that use the Perfect Participle, including Passive Voice and Participle Adjectives
Timelines
Make good use of timelines to depict the past time period when the context occurs, then to demonstrate how a verb can take place even before that time frame. If there is a result that carries into the referenced time period, don’t forget to show that on the timeline as well.
Ordering the Verbs
For non-visual learners, a timeline might not be so helpful. Another method is to list all the verbs in the order that they occur in context (or beyond). That order may not be the same as the order they are expressed in the text or speech. When a verb’s number is the same as or higher than the one listed before it, then keep the verb in the Past Simple (or perhaps Past Continuous) tense. But when the verb’s number is lower than the one that came before it (in other words, when the events move backward like a flashback instead of progressing forward), it should probably be in the Past Perfect tense.
Insights has a video that models teaching Past Perfect in this way. Click the button below to check it out!
Insider Access
Visit our How to Teach Past Perfect page on www.insightstoEnglish.com for a demonstrational video, bonus notes, printouts, a slideshow for your class, practice activities, and more.
Further Reading
Encyclopedia Pages
Insights Articles
Intermediate Topics
CEFR Levels B1-B2: Pre-Intermediate to Upper Intermediate courses
