The preterit perfect-When should I use it?
"Hubo una investigación", so my friend told me. Yesterday some shady looking fellows started trading plastic baggies in the park downtown and so I naturally asked what had happened. He answered me with the words that started this paragraph.
Anyways, it got me thinking about the preterit perfect and how I don't know how to use it haha. My personal verb book mentions it's use after certain expression involving time, for instance after 'apenas' but I wanted to know if anyone had real examples of its use in literature.
Thanks it advance.
4 Answers
Hi pura, what I can tell you directly forget about this tense, it is so rarely used in Spanish you will hardly find examples.
Hube comido...you will get strange looks if you say that
he comido, había comido, comí,,these are the three tenses we use.
Hubo una investigación.
This is different, here we are talking haber impersonal, that is "hay" in past simple.
It comes from the verb "haber." - to have.
Present tense:
Hay - there is, there are Hay un gato en el patio.
There is a cat in the yard.
Hay tres perros en el carro. There are three dogs in the car.
Hubo is the past tense (preterite).
Hubo - there was, there were..
Hubo una investigación.
There was an investigation.
As to examples in literature...hmmmmmmm, sorry, don't know any.
In English, we use the past perfect tense in phrases like "I had been driving" or "You had been writing".
Check out this link to a previous thread which discussed the perfect tenses.
Oh definitely I get the use of the pluperfect. It's the preterit that is confusing me:
Hube ido versus Había ido Hubieron comido versus Habían comido
Etc.
