but all my past English teachers would have marked it with a big red AWK.

between the second and third 'HAD'?

The 3rd 'had' is the first word in the main verb of the sentence. The subject of the main sentence is "all-the-faith-he-had-had"; it's not usual to separate the subject and verb with a comma.

that makes sense now.

The sentence says nothing about "lost faith". It says the faith he had, had no effect on his life. We don't know if he no longer has that faith, or the past tense is because he died.

because we wouldn't be talking about present (or future) faith having an effect in the past. The quadruple 'had' is a tautology, really.

Any other reading renders the sentence nonsense. Faith that one still has cannot be accurately described as faith one "had had"--the phrase describes a break in continuity between the past and the present.

I had had English as soon as I could speak in sentences.

But it is possible that someone had had 'had had had had' in their sentence, at some time.

...having had 'had had had had' had had an effect on his life.

TYY

had had no effect on the other GD threads.

I read it this way:

All the faith he'd had (slight pause) had had no effect....

"Oysters oysters eat eat."

Or "Diseases people doctors treated have spread."

Think of it them as syntactic "tongue twister." Specifically testing center-embedding.


BTW, there's a fault in your example. It's partly dialectal. A bit is just muddiness.

"All the faith he had had had had no effect on his life."

There's a tendency in English to sort of pleonastically make the tense after a perfect a bit more perfect than necessary.

"All the faith he had had / had no effect on his life" reduces to the same.

As you go back in time you wind up with something like this schema:

t0 Now has

t-1 past had

t-2 pluperfect had had

If you want to say "the faith he had had had had no effect on his life," that's okay--but you're putting a time between t-1 and t-2 (it's not just "had," but "had had"--meaning it was prior to some past event or state t-1). There's no logical way in the sentence to distinguish between t-1 and t-2; there's no grammatical reason for the distinction. Except that we've backed one verb up in the past and our little grammar generating machine is stuck on the "state prior to a past action" setting. It's a grammatical studder. And, yes, it's been discussed and documented in the linguistics literature for English. Older speakers find the 4-had sentence ill formed. Younger speakers tend to find it well formed, but come up with idiosyncratic reasons for why it's different. Which finally gets most of them to hunker down and say, "It just is" (conceding the argument) or to say it's an innovation so of course there are going to be a lot of divergent opinions. Or it's just going to be neoplastic--it's there, it's okay, but it doesn't actually contribute much. Sort of like "ne" in Modern French.

The tri-perfecta works better (and becomes clearer, partly because it's more grammatical) if you add a bit to motivate the second pluperfect:

"All the faith he had had had had no effect on his life until he had been tempted."

Then it's wordy, because "All the faith he had had no effect on his life until he was tempted" covers the same ground without the pretense--all the temporal relations are things we can fill in easily enough.

"All the faith he had had no effect on his life until he was tempted" doesn't convey the sense of telling a story about someone looking back. The pluperfect exists for a reason - we normally narrate something using the past tense, and if you want to show that a character in the story is considering the past from their point of view, you use the pluperfect. It's not an ill-formed sentence, and older speakers are quite comfortable with the pluperfect (I'd bet the older you are, the more likely you are to know what it is).

Last edited Sun Dec 1, 2013, 10:03 PM - Edit history (1)

Take me back to the old ways, when the exciting parts of a story got shifted into a present tense like it's happening NOW.

Next she's handcuffing him to a urinal!

Two "hads" in a row is already too complex. It's an indication of post-processing, of the fabrication of evidence. I begin to suspect the guy with the had had had had NEVER really had faith. His previous faiths were lies.

The only way to sneak two hads into a rightsome story is an apostrophe "d" as in, "She was done listening to his bullshit story, she'd had enough."

The great power of the English language is that it has a minimal alphabet, very loosely connected to phonetics, and it evolves.

The English language easily adopts foreign and synthetic words and grammars.