Pluperfect

Pluperfect

The 'pluperfect' (from Latin plus quam perfectum, "more than perfect"), also called 'past perfect' in English, is a grammatical tense representing a combination of a past tense with another past tense, such as the perfect or imperfect.

Example:

"It had been raining all night (past + imperfect) when he awoke, and he found that George had taken (past + perfect) his raincoat."

It is used to refer to an occurrence that was already in the past at a past time. 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).

In the sentence "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" (from Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning), "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 still relevant at the time of the later event. Because that second, subsequent event is itself a past event and the past tense is used to refer to it ("a man...now found"), the pluperfect is needed to make it clear that the first event (reaching the limit) has taken place even earlier in the past.