English Grammar Help Thread (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

English Grammar Help Thread
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

GuardianJY
Groupie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5684 days ago
74 posts - 72 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Italian, Swedish, French

Message 10 of 12

12 May 2009 at 2:21am | IP Logged

Tyr wrote:

Quote:

Does the following statement sound good: "I closed the door before I had said goodbye"?

Thats right.
"I closed the door before I said goodbye"? says you closed the door then said goodbye.
"I closed the door before I had said goodbye"? doesn't say that you actually did say goodbye, you just closed the door before you should have done it.

This is correct on some levels. To me, "I closed the door before I had said goodbye," is redundant in its use of "had." I would say, "I closed the door before I said goodbye," if I were meaning that I said goodbye after I closed the door or that I had not said goodbye at all because I would be referencing the frame of time of, "before I closed the door," which is in the past.
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ofdw
Diglot
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 5854 days ago
39 posts - 47 votes
Speaks: English*, Italian

Message 11 of 12

12 June 2009 at 10:43pm | IP Logged

Volte wrote:

Yes, it's a regional difference. My friends in the UK "revise" for exams, for instance; that usage of the term quite struck me when I was first exposed to it (I'd say "study"). I'd say this usage is fairly unthinkable in North America, while I'd be hard-pressed to think of an example of someone from the UK saying something else in this context.

Yep, that's about right. I "revised" for all my exams in the 80s and 90s here in the UK, and there was no sense of amending or updating! But you can also talk about revisions to a document, for example. Revise in the sense of review, look over again etc, is a specific usage relating to exam preparation.
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ofdw
Diglot
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 5854 days ago
39 posts - 47 votes
Speaks: English*, Italian

Message 12 of 12

12 June 2009 at 10:50pm | IP Logged

GuardianJY wrote:

Tyr wrote:

Quote:

Does the following statement sound good: "I closed the door before I had said goodbye"?

I can see the shade of meaning that is intended with the second sentence (including "had") - which you could enhance by the use of "even":
"I closed the door before I had even said goodbye"
meaning that I hadn't even got around to saying goodbye before closing the door.
BUT I wonder if it is more correctly expressed as follows:
"I had closed the door before I had (even) said goodbye".

I'm not sure I can analyse this accurately though!

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