DÊ RESPOSTAS - English

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When I read an English book I found something that make me wondering, it is say ”I only wish I had had this gem as a reference duringing my playing games” my question is why it said ”had” Twice


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AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJanuary 2022
As mentioned in a previous answer, ”I wish I had done sth” expresses a wish in the past that didn’t happen.

However, using ”I wish” in this unreal conditional always expresses the regret that this condition was not met.

As for two ”had”s - the first ”had” is the auxiliary verb for past perfect tense in the unreal conditional. The second ”had” is the past perfect form of the verb ”to have”.

So, in your case - we could rewrite it as ”I regret that I didn’t have this gem”.
  • AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJanuary 2022
    Wish + past simple tends to describe the fact of that wish existing in the past. It doesn’t tell us really whether there is regret or not.

    Just about every British English speaker would use wish + past perfect for expressing regrets. I’ve heard some Americans use ”wish + simple past” also to express regrets, but that’s more regional/dialect I would guess. It’s not standard English, neither British nor American.
kasiaka profile picture kasiakaJanuary 2022

Because there is Past Perfect tense used there. I think we use ’wish + Past Perfect’ when we refer to something we regret that happened or didn’t happen in the past.

  • AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJanuary 2022
    ”wish + past perfect” is always about some sort of regret.

    If you want to indicate that there is little/no regret for something in the past, then you would use a structure like ”wish + past simple”.
AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgJanuary 2022
@JohnCarey

No worries. At least you knew something about what a subjunctive was! I’ve had native English speaker colleagues with very high opinions of their teaching abilities and stated knowledge of English yet giving me blank stares at the mere mention of the term ”subjunctive”.

For ”had had” to have been a past subjunctive form, then a sentence such as:

”I wished I had had this gem.” gives a past subjunctive perfect form. We are reporting the past fact that a wish for this gem existed. So, the subjunctive goes to the ”past in the past” form.

In either British English or American English, the definition of what the subjunctive mood boils down to expressing a ”wish” or something that is ”hypothetical”. It seems that ”uncertain” might have been a mistake either in your textbook or the understanding of whoever was teaching. ”Uncertain” does not mean ”hypothetical” or ”wish”. Models of certainty such as ”would/could/might/may” are usually not subjunctive!

There’s also a problem with the grammatical terminology ”unreal conditional”. I suspect that someone writing the textbook (or influencing the textbook writer) had come to the conclusion that ”unreal conditional” must be hypothetical because there is ”unreal” in the term and extrapolated that to ”hypothetical” and then on to ”subjunctive” because ”subjunctive deals with hypotheticals”.

I used the term ”unreal condition” in my answer because that is the standard term which is used in most English courses. A better term would be something like ”unrealised condition”.

Most expressions defined as ”unreal conditionals” are in the majority of cases expressing that a given course of action was not available/probable at some point in time because certain conditions/a condition did not occur. So, in most cases, unreal conditionals are not subjunctive - there is neither some form of wish nor something hypothetical being discussed. At the referenced time frame, the choice usually still exists for one course of action or another.

Subjunctive does seem to be ignored by most Americans from what I’ve observed. Many have difficulties in even differentiating simple and perfect tense forms. I’ve even heard statements such as ”’I have seen’ and ’I saw’ mean the same thing, so don’t worry about it” come from those who have supposedly graduated from the humanities departments of top US universities.

I disagree that it is a pedantic thing to understand whether ”had had” is past subjunctive perfect or past perfect. Implicitly expressed by this terminology is understanding whether what is being described is either wishful/hypothetical or something more concrete such as a formed event in the past. In this case, the regret is a real thing - not just some blahblah wishful thinking in the past.
JohnCarey profile picture JohnCareyJanuary 2022
Hi AussieInBg,

I didn’t mean to start an argument, only to help. Thanks for your thoughtful rebuttal. For what it is worth, I agree with most of what you wrote.

Please consider my counter argument.

When I learned English grammar, which I will admit was some time ago now, the conditional case was almost always associated with the subjunctive mood. Specifically, I was taught that the subjunctive mood is meant to express things that are uncertain or hypothetical. Conditionals are by their very nature uncertain or hypothetical and in the case of the past, unreal, hence the subjunctive case is appropriate, or at least that was the way I learned it.

I find the distinction you make in the last paragraph to be a little unclear. Perhaps if I had had spent more time studying English grammar, I would understand that paragraph a bit better.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think that with regard to this point, there is any great divergence between American and British English, although I’ll admit in common American usage the subjunctive often ignored.

The point is, of course, a bit pedantic because in this particular case, the past perfect and the past perfect subjunctive take exactly the same form, so no matter what path we would respectively take to get there, we would both find ourselves in the same place with respect to ”had had”.

Thanks, I enjoyed the dialog.
JohnCarey profile picture JohnCareyJanuary 2022
Forgive me, but I think that the discussion of unreal conditionals may be a bit off the mark with respect to the original question. I appears to me that Mxmachine was asking about the verb form itself, not unreal conditional form of the sentence, although those are clearly related.

In the third conditional form (as it was called when I was in school), you use the past perfect subjunctive form of the verb in the conditional clause. In English, the past perfect subjunctive takes the same form as the past perfect so the simple answer is that, ”had had” is the past perfect subjunctive form of ”to have”, which is constructed by using the simple past tense of the verb ”to have” which is ”had” plus the past participle of the verb ”to have” which is also, ”had”.

So the form is:
Past perfect form = ”simple past” + ”past participle”