Thora wrote:

@Javizy - As JimmySeal mentioned, the OP's main sentence is past tense ("she was able to") and using "having studied" (perfect participle) indicates a prior past action. "Had studied" or "Had been studying" would also work.

Your "has studied" would work in a present tense sentence. (Or "studied")
(btw, I think US and UK English use certain tenses a bit differently, so you may encounter examples that sound a bit strange to you.)

Good point, and a ケアレスミス by me.

Having studied Japanese to mastery, she is considering becoming a translator.
She has studied Japanese to mastery, so she is considering becoming a translator.

Having studied Japanese to mastery, she decided to become a translator.
She had studied Japanese to mastery, so she decided to become a translator.

I think my confusion came from the last sentence. Although her decision was in the past, the mastery could still be very relevant to the present (depending on the context and my perception). Saying 'she had studied' made me think 'well, what about now?' It doesn't quite feel right with 'has' though. I guess it's me who needs to review the perfect...

Those aren't "having Ved" type sentences, though. Rewriting the original "having V-ed" sentence created limitations because the participle clause ("having studied...,") has to relate to the verb tense of the main sentence.

So are you moving on to more general thoughts about the uses of present and past perfect? Best to just take at what's written about it, if you're curious. Or, even better, get back to your Japanese projects... 

Sentence 1: The present perfect can have the sense of したことがある, right? "Have you ever studied French?"  More about the fact of experience, than timeline or consequence?

Sentence 2: Simple past works here. The "at one point" makes it clear that the period of study was entirely in the past. Without it, I suppose using the past perfect would emphasize that your studies ended in the past. who knows.

@thistime:  Don't worry, I found that ESL learners knew far more grammer than I did. I'm from the No Grammar/No Red Pen generation, so I had a lot of catching up to do just to understand students' questions. I actually find grammar interesting now - especially the differences between languages and what that might say about them.

Thora wrote:

Those aren't "having Ved" type sentences, though. Rewriting the original "having V-ed" sentence created limitations because the participle clause ("having studied...,") has to relate to the verb tense of the main sentence.

So are you moving on to more general thoughts about the uses of present and past perfect? Best to just take at what's written about it, if you're curious. Or, even better, get back to your Japanese projects... 

Sentence 1: The present perfect can have the sense of したことがある, right? "Have you ever studied French?"  More about the fact of experience, than timeline or consequence?

Sentence 2: Simple past works here. The "at one point" makes it clear that the period of study was entirely in the past. Without it, I suppose using the past perfect would emphasize that your studies ended in the past. who knows.

@thistime:  Don't worry, I found that ESL learners knew far more grammer than I did. I'm from the No Grammar/No Red Pen generation, so I had a lot of catching up to do just to understand students' questions. I actually find grammar interesting now - especially the differences between languages and what that might say about them.

If you're talking to me... yes, I was simply illustrating exceptions to my little extemporaneous rule-making exercise, re: matching tenses/sense of the contemporaneous, etc., strictly using those structures (however you want to label them, pluperfect etc.), 'had verb-ed', 'has/have verb-ed', 'having verb-ed', based on how they're similar/conflict when 'prefacing'. Once you see the 'having verb-ed,' you're expecting the follow-up, but it can be in the past or present or future, etc. But when you see 'had' or 'has/have', you're looking for something to follow up in the same general timeline. Your Sentence 1 and 2 explanations, you just repeated what I said in my first comment and right next to the example sentences in my previous comment! ;p

Why would you think it's best for me to take what's written about it? If there's anything written about it that's different from what I've said here, it's most likely wrong. ^_^ The rest is just me musing for my own, well a-muse-ment. The OP has moved on, and hopefully any L2 people have learned not to look to someone like me for tips. ;p

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 10:56 pm)

Thora wrote:

Oh

Your Sentence 1 and 2 explanations, you just repeated what I said in my first comment and right next to the example sentences in my previous comment! ;p

No. Your first earlier posts were about perfect participle (having). Neither sentence uses that. And we have different ideas on the sentences (as I understand your comments.) But none of this matters - so let's leave at that.

I meant where I described 'having' as evoking a kind of potential immediacy (like 'have/has') when referencing a past possession (the possession as I used it being the quality of an experience)... it was a sentiment I echoed in my first example in the comment you replied to, where I emphasized the contemporaneous weight of the unmet expectations (the semantic context vs. the situational context).

For the second sentence (and before it) I mentioned the use of specific times--in this particular structure of the 'perfects' being used to preface another event--as allowing for flexibility (in breaking the usual connotation and locating that event closer to or further away from the situational context, et cetera.) I tried to magnify this by contrasting events within the sentence explicitly, rather than the tacit contrast of semantic/situational...

I also explained that I thought it was pointless to stretch without altering, i.e. add modifications to make them fit, except for the purposes of my comment-exercise. In a sense I conjured up these rules based on thwarted connotations* as an explanation for why the OP example in question was jarring rather than simply 'seldom used' (I was arguing with an imaginary and extremely descriptive grammatician [grammarian]), but to make those exceptions work as I played devil's advocate and tested my explanation, in addition to becoming awkward, they eventually warped the construction to the point that they wouldn't have had an overall contribution to the connotations of 'having', et al., regardless. That preemptive admission based on the specific purpose of using those particular examples rigidly, I feel, rendered moot what you said about using another form ('simple past' or 'have you ever studied French?') ...

I threw in the bit about 'having' making it easier because it allows for all those variations, without having to add 'at one point', 'but', etc.

Lastly, you'll note none of my comments initially addressed the actual problem, but were tangential to it, because the basics were a given that I knew others would cover, so I wanted to focus on things like why the Google results confused some into thinking it was common, descriptive grammar and terminology, etc. Only after the OP moved on and comments continued for some time did I decide to return and really look at the initial problem in more detail, but from a more interesting angle (to me), (thus my confusion at being suggested to 'just take what's written elsewhere' rather than play with the language explanations on a subtler level).

*Thwarted connotations in the sense of you're reading it, 'having' indicates this potential immediacy or past reference, then 'had' comes in, both resonating/repeating the latter potential and closing off the former before the completion of the sentence affirms this prioritization of the second of the redundant syntactical elements. Thus the exercise of the fanatical, imaginary descriptivist antagonist was to offset this subjectively 'jarring' component I suggested by lessening the contributing resonance of the connotations via exceptions that it was my task to design: uses of the present and past perfect in that type of sentence structure that don't necessarily maintain an immediacy or distance, respectively, for the prefaced event.

This comment has been extensively rewritten for clarity. You're welcome. ^_^ Took a while to pare it down. I will title the longform version either "Having said that: Kanjis Gramophone" or "iRuiner: A Pluperfect Aesthetics" ...

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 17, 5:01 am)