Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Grammar

I'm having a little trouble remember what each tense means, in French, for the verb Aller (not that I'm trying to learn all of them, but there are a couple that are significant). The one at the moment is the 'plus-que-parfait' tense, which translates to "pluperfect tense". And what is pluperfect?

"The pluperfect (from Latin plus quam perfectum more than perfect), also called past perfect in English, is a grammatical combination of past tense with the perfect, itself a combination of tense and aspect, that exists in most Indo-European languages. It is used to refer to an event that had continuing relevance to a past time. Comrie[1]:p.64 classifies the pluperfect as an absolute-relative tense because it absolutely (not by context) establishes a deixis (the past) and places the action relative to the deixis (before it)."

Thanks, Wiki. That's way clear. Once again, About French comes through:

"The French past perfect, or pluperfect, is used to indicate an action in the past that occurred before another action in the past. The latter can be either mentioned in the same sentence or implied."

Okay, that, I understand.

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