It might be said with some good degree of truth that the best reason to study language closely—and grammar is the foundation of that study—is the habit of awareness it can help instill. To be aware of what’s going on predisposes us to ask questions and look for the reasons behind the circumstances we find ourselves in, whether fictive or actual. I can imagine few things more important than that, for without reasons we remain either victims of our impressions or automatons at another’s behest. Neither is an option.
The paradox, of course, is that awareness is perceptive and language is constructive. Or perhaps we could say that when we are aware, we are passively discerning, and when we are reading and writing, we are actively analyzing—shaking and sifting out from phrases and clauses and sentences (what an architect might called the built environment of a linguistic world) a meaning a writer has wished to make known in a particular way and therefore to a certain extent. How well those sentences have been built and how well we perceive their design and structure will determine how successful the communicative moment will be.
Compare, for example, these two sentences: When I walked into my apartment, I noticed that the living room window was shut versus When I walked into my apartment, I noticed that the living room window had been shut. We are presented here with two statements which differ only in the predicate of the third clause, where the word shut operates as a participle (unusually, the three principal parts of the verb to shut are all spelled the same). Does each use this word shut to convey the same idea? A participle is an adjective constructed from a verb, and in the first sentence, the participle shut is working alone with the verb was to describe, as all adjectives do, some quality or characteristic of the noun it refers to. The verb was is a copula, and the intent is to describe the disposition or physical circumstance of the noun window as it was discovered by the subject.
In the second sentence, however, that same participle takes on a very different grammatical and semantic role, understanding which will make us aware of a subtle but effective difference in what the subject of the sentence wishes to convey. The word shut here is still the only complement to the verb of the third predicate, but now that verb has changed from the simple was to the compound had been. This kind of change, which we might not register in reading the two sentences quickly, alters the scene significantly. The verb was is the simple past tense of the verb to be, which is doing nothing more as a copula than to connect the noun window with the adjective shut. We are thereby meant to perceive a situation, not an action.
But something did happen in the second sentence with that change to the verb had been. We now have two auxiliaries which, together with the participle, combine to form the past perfect tense (had) and the passive voice (been) of the verb to shut. In this version, then, the word shut works outright as the participle of a finite verb, not merely as a descriptive predicate adjective, as in the first version. This is why in reading the second version we are inclined to wonder, who had shut the window? The cast and hue of the statement is now on action and agency, rather than on circumstance and condition.
Sometimes the adjective and its corresponding participle have different spellings: the window was open versus the window had been opened. But then again we’re back to the same ambiguity with a verb such as to close: the window was closed versus the window had been closed. And if in wider contexts we read similarly that so many lives were disrupted, we are positioned to think about a situation; but if instead we read that so many lives had been disrupted, we are urged to think about who did what to whom—and thereby perhaps remember, and let ourselves be touched more deeply by, the consequences of real actions taken or perpetrated. Much, very much, depends on language, both as it is written and as it is read.
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