I know how to use past perfect and past tense but when I read articles in the website and newspaper especially on news. they use "had" without any past tense followed. I'm not american native speaker and I'm confuse. What is the use of 'had' without following past tense.
example of this is from article of BBC:
"The French energy giant EDF, with support from state-owned China General Nuclear, had expected to build the £18bn plant."
you would see that "had" was used in this sentence without any past tense followed. and what is it mean. pls explain this.
Best Answer
In this case, "expected" is the past participle (on regular verbs, past participles are identical in form to the past tense) of the verb expect, so the past perfect with the had is still there!