has/had seen

Present:

John is here. He looks as though he has seen a ghost.

Past:

I met John yesterday. He looked as though he had seen a ghost.

Tenses must agree.

Well said, fresco.

JTT

The word "fallacy" is perhaps inappropriate. You omit to discuss the length of time "he was is the room", in order for it to be acceptable to change "has" to "had".

Perhaps fallacy sounded a bit too strong, Fresco. Nevertheless, it is untrue that tenses always have to agree. You've allowed as much in your discussion.

Actually, this raises the technical point of different attitudes to "grammar". In traditional grammar the "sentence" is considered to be the unit of analysis on which "rules" operate, but modern grammarians (e.g. Halliday) have argued for "discourse analysis" in which the context of real "utterances" as opposed to abstract "sentences"is taken into account.

Traditional grammar was wrong about a lot of things. It follows then that the attitudes about that grammar are themselves mistaken. When something is wrong, is there any sense in maintaining said mistakes/attitudes?

The final arbiter of acceptability may therefore be "semantics" rather than "grammaticality" and that is what a non-native speaker of English tends to find difficult because there will always be problems with understanding total context. Such a speaker would prefer a simple rule.

JTT,

Without getting bogged down with the nuances of competing linguistic models I would merely remark that your use of "wrong" is simplistic. Your "in the room" scenario simply evokes extrinsic contextual considerations beyond that expressed by the "sentence". Once any form of context is evoked, we go beyond the realms of "traditional grammar" and there is no limit to the possibilities for general rule modification. Examples of this occur with respect to the sociological roots of idiolects and in poetry.

JTT

The fact remains that the sentence "He looks as if he had seen a ghost" is statistically aberrent to UK speakers of English because active percepton will assign it "meaning" equivalent to the "has" version.

Hello again, Fresco. I allowed that that was the case. I wrote,

"Which is the most commonly used of the three above? Probably 'has seen', but that doesn't exclude the others."

And I'd say that that would be the case for NaE as well.

I guess my point wrt that is, that is what Tanguatlay should have been told at the outset, that this particular construction is uncommon, not that tenses must match.


Where this feeling of aberration comes from could be explained by reference to culture, perhaps using the model of Chomsky's transformational grammar in which "had seen" (surface structure) is a culture specific transformation of "has had the experience of seeing some time ago" (deep structure). Note that the "difference" between the "has" and "had" versions can only be substantiated by assuming the "some time ago" sub-context...but this will only occur by juxtaposing the "has" and "had" versions...without such juxtaposition the versions remain semantically equivalent with the second grammatically aberrent (to some).

These considerations are my reasons for using the word "simplistic".

This is plausible in UK English:

B: Ask A what he's been up to, C.

C: What have you been doing lately, A?

A: I have recently been to Spain.

B: What does[/u] he say, C? 'does', really?

C: He says that he has recently been to Spain.

He looks as if he has seen a ghost.

He looks as if he had seen a ghost.

Is there any difference between the sentences?

Many thanks.