The continuing past (Updated)

AT A lecture I gave recently to journalism students, the discussion, until now focused on the principles of news writing, was detoured by someone in the audience toward a grammatical subject – tense sequence. It is not a subject off too far, really. After all, news writing is storytelling, a narrative of a topical past, of something that has happened, or has been happening, until the moment of its telling, and, as such, set in a time that stretches across a distance from some point in the past, sometimes well back, up to the very moment that it is set down. That’s precisely the territory for tense sequence: the continuing past (a phrase I have borrowed, by the way, from Renato Constantino and his wife, Letizia, who used it as the title for a book they co-authored, thus putting it to definitely far more profound use than in our case).

As it happens, I have set down my own discussion of the subject in a book, Basic Journalism, An ASEAN Handbook (1992), which I’m now reworking not only to update it but also to broaden its scope (provisionally titled How to Find, Write, and Edit the News). Here’s the latest, and possibly final, draft of that entry.

TENSE SEQUENCE

Intended precisely to delineate sequences of, and relationships between, occurrences by the inflection of verbs, this grammatical rule seems more often broken than followed, thus making it difficult for the reader to navigate time settings, if not causing him to be entirely lost in them. Basically, the rule requires that the tense in a subordinate clause be adjusted to that in the main clause:

He said he was happy.

In the example, the main verb, said, being in the past tense, requires the subordinate verb, was, to be in the same tense and to be specific, in exactly the same tense (simple past) to denote coinciding instants – being happy at the exact moment that he said he was. If happiness had come earlier, the past perfect tense would have been required for the subordinate verb:

He said he had been happy.

The rule is that all events or actions happening before the simple past one, necessarily the latest one, must be set in the past perfect tense. This rule finds wide application in news reporting since it deals with related events happening at varying points in the immediate past:

He said he had accepted the job after he had been assured that it had been offered to no one else.

Often in a news story, the latest action is that of the news source talking (“The president said…”, “he said…”, “the police said…”). When such a clause begins a sentence, as in our preceding examples, it does dictate the tenses of the subordinate verbs. But when it is interpolated or parenthetic, neither does it govern nor it is governed; it is treated as a grammatical non-relation. Let us rearrange our last example to show the difference:

He accepted the job, he said, after he had been assured that it had been offered to no one else.

The parenthetic attribution is ignored, and accepted is promoted to governing verb. This construction works best in reporting a present-progressive action or a promise, a threat, or a forecast of some dramatic future action:

He is waiting to kill his wife, a neighbor said.

On that ominous note…

Vergel O. Santos will no longer write as regularly and often as he has done (weekly), but only occasionally, owing to more pressing preoccupations – the editors.