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I occasionally run into some aspect of English grammar or syntax that slaps me in the face with "Also, knowing the basics of Latin grammar does not mean you know how to describe every aspect of English grammar!" (And that's just counting the ones I can actually identify; native immersion does wonders for fluency, and also does wonders for obscuring the mechanics.) Some of them are relatively trivial (What do you call the future perfect when it's also progressive? It can't be both perfect and progressive, can it?) and solved with a quick trawl through relevant articles on Wikipedia; on others I end up flailing and "You know when..."-ing a lot until someone who knows these things betters steps up and gives me a hand.
So here's today's question: what's the official term for when a narrative in the past tense moves into the past perfect, but does so by marking a few verbs with the past perfect, then lapsing back into the simple past, with the past-perfect nature being thus understood without all the repetition of "had"? Most of the examples I can think of come from children's books, but it goes something like:
"Sally thought about her summers on the beach when she was still living in San Diego. What fun that had been! She had gone there for three years running, and always enjoyed the waves. Her brothers spent most of the time in the house with video games, but she ran around on the beach with her friend Susan, who was quite nice aside from all those odd stories about talking lions..."
It's a horrid example, but you get the gist. And sometimes there's a swap back into "had" at the end of the section, to mark coming back into the current-narrative past tense. Surely there has to be a term for that, in literary or linguistics academia.
So here's today's question: what's the official term for when a narrative in the past tense moves into the past perfect, but does so by marking a few verbs with the past perfect, then lapsing back into the simple past, with the past-perfect nature being thus understood without all the repetition of "had"? Most of the examples I can think of come from children's books, but it goes something like:
"Sally thought about her summers on the beach when she was still living in San Diego. What fun that had been! She had gone there for three years running, and always enjoyed the waves. Her brothers spent most of the time in the house with video games, but she ran around on the beach with her friend Susan, who was quite nice aside from all those odd stories about talking lions..."
It's a horrid example, but you get the gist. And sometimes there's a swap back into "had" at the end of the section, to mark coming back into the current-narrative past tense. Surely there has to be a term for that, in literary or linguistics academia.