Had been given

Question

"When we met with agents of the consortium, before they had been given the formal decision on the tender, they were suggesting it was an ambitious timetable to do it in three years," he told Reuters. (Reuters.) (Both "we met..." and "they were suggesting..." happened first, i.e., before "they had been given...".)My question is: Why are the preceding actions not expressed in the Past Perfect tenses and the following them "they had been given..." in the Simple Past - passive?

Clive · Accepted Answer

The speaker proably did not have enough time to think carefully about tenses and about sentence structure.

CalifJim · Answer

tkacka15
"When we met with agents of the consortium, before they had been given the formal decision on the tender, they were suggesting it was an ambitious timetable to do it in three years," he told Reuters. (Reuters.)
...
My question is: Why are the preceding actions not expressed in the Past Perfect tenses and the following them "they had been given..." in the Simple Past - passive?

The meaning is They had not yet been given the decision when we met with them (and when they were suggesting it was an ambitious timetable).

See for a discussion of 'before' with the past perfect.

This grammatical pattern is often used to indicate an unexpected order of events. In the case at hand, it seems that the decision was expected to come first, and then the meeting in which they were commenting on the timetable, but this is not what happened.

CJ

Had been given

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