The past perfect

Question

The Indian government has announced plans for installing a tsunami early warning system in the wake of the Indian Ocean disaster.

A minister said the country had had no warning of Sunday's giant wave which killed at least 7,000 in India alone.

A US-made pressure recording system is to be laid on the ocean floor and linked to surface data buoys.

The new system will be similar to that used in the Pacific Ocean and should also provide warnings of cyclones.

"If the country had had such an alert system in place, we could have warned the coastal areas of the imminent danger and avoided the loss of life," said Kapil Sibal, India's minister of state for science and technology.

International proposals to install an early warning system in the Indian Ocean were raised last year but made little progress.

You will find two instances of past perfec tense in the above.

1. A minister said the country had had no warning of Sunday's giant .......

2. "If the country had had such an alert system in place, we could have warned the coastal areas of the imminent danger ...........

Are they fine? I think the simple past would be fine here.

Just the truth · Accepted Answer

You will find two instances of past perfect tense in the above.

1. A minister said the country had had no warning of Sunday's giant .......

2. "If the country had had such an alert system in place, we could have warned the coastal areas of the imminent danger ...........

Are they fine? I think the simple past would be fine here.

=

Hi Andrei,

Present perfect and past perfect are sometimes used to gain greater effect, to add importance to a finished event, to bring the event or issue to a current relevance. This is serious stuff, the devastating results of this calamity are obviously of great importance.

In this case sentence 1 is simply a reported speech backshift. News reports/written and spoken often follow the rules of reported speech more diligently because they want to be as objective as possible.

So to finally answer your question, yes, a simple past would work but as I've noted [as I noted] above, the social situation, how and where language is used often "forces or encourages" one choice over another.

With respect to 2, in some circumstances, a simpler,

If the country had such an alert system in place, ...

would work. Here though, the minister is focusing in a more pointed fashion on the past, on the actual event.

Remarking to my friends, I could easily say,

If the Indian Ocean had such an alert system in place, like the Pacific Ocean, this wouldn't have been so bad.

If such an alert system were in place, ...

Language choice is highly dependent on a number of variables. People don't make language decisions based on the simple rules described by traditional grammar. Life and language are much much too complex for that.

The past perfect

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