past-perfectpast-tensesemi-modals
Is the sentence below grammatically ok? Or something is wrong with it?
Or
Can we use past simple from ought – oughted? I found it somewhere but it seems to be awkward…
I am an American, and had not noticed this phenomenon. I would have said "I was almost done with my essay when the computer crashed and I found that I had forgotten to save it". So, I decided to check a few N-grams to try to isolate it.
he had decided , he decided (American)
he had decided , he decided (British)
I had forgotten, I forgot (American)
I had forgotten, I forgot (Brithish)
she had lost, she lost (American)
she had lost, she lost (British)
From this data we can see that:
This may depend on the verb in question, but we can expect to read the simple past two to four times as often as the perfect past.
I would assume that spoken English is even more biased towards the simple past than written English.
I would hypothesize that this phenomenon is due at least some of the following factors:
When talking about things in the past, the past perfect happens before the simple past.
In your example
If someone feels that they had never made a mistake in their life, then it means they had never tried a new thing in their life.
had never made and had never tried are two actions which were started and ended in the past compared with how the person feels (present). The equivalent would be
If someone feels that they never made a mistake in their life, then it means they had never tried a new thing in their life.
where never made is nearer in time than had never tried since one would have had to try before failing.
I had called you
I had gone to the wash room
could individually use the simple past
I called you
I went to the wash room
with similar meaning, however, using past perfect sets up a scenario for something in the more recent past
I had called you before I went to the wash room
I had gone to the wash room before I called you
To answer where you were when they called:
I had gone to the wash room when you called me
means you were in the wash room (past perfect) when the person called
I went to the wash room when you called me
means you heard the phone ring then went (simple past) to the wash room
Best Answer
Although I'm not a native speaker, in all of my years of experience, I've never seen they oughted to work harder. I don't think the past tense form of the verb ought even exists. Just like there's no past tense form of the modal must. I'd say that if you want to express ought in the past, you would simply say had. And to be perfectly honest, ought is not used that often in spoken English. You'll most likely hear it used as part of set phrases like you ought not judge, you ought not to have done that, et cetera. There's not a whole lot of expressions like that in English though.
PS: Notice that the grammar in the two examples with ought that I gave you is a little bit inconsistent. In the second example, there is a to while the first one doesn't have it. And that's the point that I'm trying to make: ought is an old-style verb that has survived in modern English in the form of idiomatic expressions whose grammatical structures may seem antiquated and irregular.