Past Perfect Tense is the past equivalent of the Present Perfect Tense.
Past Perfect Tense is used to talk about an action that happened before a particular point of time in the past.
Here, it communicates that, the first action happened before the second action. We use Past Perfect Tense to explain the action that happened first. However, both the actions took place in the past and the completed action which took place after the first action is conveyed using Simple Present Tense (e.g. Lilly arrived).
Had is a primary auxiliary. The base form of it is “have”. We use “had” here to indicate that the action has happened in the past. Whether the subject is in Singular or Plural, we use “had” in all the Past Perfect Tenses.
The complete verb in the Past Perfect Tense is made by adding the Past Participle form of the main verb in the sentence to the verb “had”.
Any action verb has different forms as follows. These different verb forms are used to create the Complete Verb in different tenses.
Eg: different forms of the verb “go” and “work”.
Base form (Simple Present – Plural) | go | work |
---|---|---|
Simple Present – Singular verb form | goes | works |
Simple Past verb form (V2) | went | worked |
Present Participle verb form | going | working |
Past Participle verb form (V3) | gone | worked |
Let’s take a look an example sentence.
Let’s see how we could construct Past Perfect Tense sentences with different subjects.
The following table elaborates how we should construct the sentences with the correct verb form for different purposes;-
Let’s discuss, when and where to use Past Perfect Tense.
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