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Yesterday it _____ all day | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Spiderkat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5813 days ago 175 posts - 248 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 17 of 29 11 June 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
To me B is the correct answer and pretty much for the same reason I would say that it can't be A, C or D. It's about a single and simple event that occured in the past and since there's no extra information then there's no reason to use any other tense than the simple past. Using C then the sentence by itself sounds incomplete and another event or piece of information would be expected. A or C are past perfect tenses that usually express any activity prior to another that also occured in the past and which would be described by using a simple past tense for instance. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tornus Diglot GroupieRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5144 days ago 82 posts - 113 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Swedish, Danish | Message 18 of 29 11 June 2011 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm not a native speaker but the tense you must use depends on the context
I tried to make it up for each sentence: A This morning the flowers were thoroughly soaked because yesterday it had rained all day. B Yesterday it rained all day. Now it is sunny. C Preterit continuous seems weird with "all day" I think, I can't find a good sentence D Yesterday it had been raining all day and this is why this morning he was tired. Am I wrong? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 19 of 29 11 June 2011 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I actually don't think this question is bad. Native speakers seem to largely agree on which answer seems best at a glance, and with what we'd fill the blank in with if we weren't given a list of choices. I think the confusion is caused by the fact that plausible clauses can be made with each of the options. However, some of these choices only work as clauses of more complex sentences. This seems to hold across the Germanic and Romance languages, as far as I can see, as well as Esperanto (corrections welcome). I wouldn't say the equivalent of "Yesterday it had been raining all day", as a complete sentence, in any of them. The lack of context or an extension to the sentence is exactly what dictates the answer. I don't think this takes university-level grammatical analysis. It takes either an analytical or intuitive feeling about what can be a complete sentence, vs what only works as a chunk of a larger one, and recognizing options as familiar without taking context into account isn't enough - but I think that is ok. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 20 of 29 11 June 2011 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree with Spiderkat - if this sentence is standing on its own, then only B sounds
completely correct, though the others are close. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sanghee Groupie United States Joined 5069 days ago 60 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 21 of 29 11 June 2011 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When I read the title I automatically thought "rained". However, before the page finished loading, I thought I'd say "was sunny" so "was raining" seems just as correct even though rained popped into my head first. It depends on context really but out of context it seems that it'd be B.
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| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6502 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 22 of 29 12 June 2011 at 3:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I "know" the answer is 'B - rained' but I had to go and do some reading to find the grammatical explanation for why it is correct.
Hopefully I can now explain why it is correct and the other answers are incorrect. I'm going to put the tense of each answer, my logic for why it is right/wrong and a description of the tenses use. I'm quoting the explanations of these forms from the Wikipedia Past Tense page because they're the clearest explanations I've found. (Note: A couple of these forms could also have meanings in the subjunctive mood however they aren't relevant here as we're stating a fact not expressing something subjective) A. had rained - Yesterday it had rained all day. Past perfect (pluperfect) "Past perfect is used for describing secluded events that have occurred before something else followed. The event that is closer to the present is given in simple past tense: After we had visited our relatives in New York, we flew back to Toronto." This is incorrect because the sentence has no following event. B. rained - Yesterday it rained all day. Simple past "Simple past is used for describing acts that have already been concluded and whose exact time of occurrence is known. Furthermore, simple past is used for retelling successive events. That is why it is commonly used in storytelling." This is correct. The time of occurrence is yesterday and the rain has concluded. If the rain hadn't concluded then it would still be raining and you might say "It has been raining since yesterday". C. was raining - Yest erday it was raining all day. Past progressive "Past progressive is used for describing events that were in the process of occurring when a new event happened. The already occurring event is presented in past progressive, the new one in simple past. Example: We were sitting in the garden when the thunderstorm started. Use is similar to other languages' imperfect." This is incorrect (although to my ear it doesn't actually sound wrong). No new event occurs in the sentence. A correct sentence might be "Yesterday it was raining when I arrived at work". D. had been raining - Yesterday it had been raining all day. Past perfect (pluperfect) progressive Wikipedia was just confusing on this one (for me). I *think* the usage for this could be described as: The same as the Past Progressive except with emphasis on a specific duration for the event that was occurring (and that duration ends before the present). However I could be misunderstanding this. Someone else might be able to clarify it for me. Incorrect. I think the following would probably be correct for this tense "It had been raining for 5 hours before the rain started to ease off." 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 23 of 29 12 June 2011 at 5:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"B" feels the most natural as a standalone sentence without any other supporting context, but *with* context any of those 4 are perfectly legitimate sentences.
If I were to hear "A", "C", or "D", I would assume that they are giving necessary background info merely as a lead-in to a story (one where they need to first establish the presence of rain). "B" on the other hand simply sounds like a statement that it rained yesterday, with no other information necessary or even expected. Based on this, I would assume that "B" is the expected answer, since it is the only one that can completely stand alone without any other supporting context. Regardless, it is a very poorly designed question. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 24 of 29 12 June 2011 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Again, the yesterday seems to be our time reference. As I said in a previous post, the sentence given "topicalised" the rain (ie it made the rain the sentence topic). It was the word "yesterday" that did it. (NB: "*" denotes an incorrect/non-native-sounding sentence.) First of all, we generally put the time reference next to the main clause, not the background clause: Yesterday the ground was wet because it had been raining all day. The ground was wet yesterday because it had been raining all day. Moving it to the other clause seems very strange. It feels like we're giving more information about the background than the more important main clause *The ground was wet because it had been raining all day yesterday. And that's with the word "yesterday" in a neutral position at the end of the clause. If we put the word at the start of the clause, the effect is increased substantially: *The ground was wet because yesterday it had been raining all day. We've now drawn so much attention to the rain that it really seems like the main point of the sentence, but the tense is clearly background information. That's what I mean by "topicalising". That's also what I mean by university-level grammatical analysis. For learners of English, it would have been more appropriate to test knowledge of the structure in context rather than in isolation. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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