Grammar Safari

Hunting for "Common" Structures: Finding the Past Perfect in a Magazine Article

 

USING THE FIND FUNCTION:

If you are looking for very common words or phrases (like articles, gerunds, infinitives, etc.) you need to locate a document first, and then use the FIND function to locate the words you are looking for.

In this example, we will be looking for instances of the past perfect aspect in articles in CNN. com. The same basic principles would apply for any common structure once a text to search has been chosen and is on the screen.

  1. Go to CNN.com and find an article that you are interested in.

  2. With the article in front of you on the screen, select "Find ..." or "Find in Page" under the EDIT menu at the top of the screen and type in what we want to find--in this case had. Since the computer will search for an exact match, we will add a space to the end of it so that the computer does not find examples like shadow.

  3. Click FIND to begin your search.

  4. When the computer finds had , it will highlight it. Notice that in some cases, the computer will find had as the main verb of a present perfect or as the past tense--not the helping verb of a past perfect aspect. This is not what we are looking for. You can use command-G on the keyboard to check the next example in the text.

  5. When you find a nice example of had used in the past perfect, you can use the mouse to highlight it and then press control-C (on a PC) or command-C (on Mac) to copy it. You can then use command-V to paste it into any open word-processing document you have available (you can also use copy and paste under the edit menu at the top of the screen).

    (Teacher's note: be sure to include enough context to make it meaningful and also include the title of the source of the example!)

  6. When we are done searching this article, you can use the BACK button at the top of the screen to back up and choose another article or to search in the same way.

To begin a search, click here to return to the Grammar Safari page.

comments should be emailed to asalzman@uiuc.edu