Hi who can help me to understand this sentence …
“That’s the book which was stolen " is this sentence right? By my opinion following to the sequence of tenses, we must write " That was the book which had been stolen” am i right ?
thank you in advance
That is the book which was stolen.
First it was stolen.
Now it has turned up somewhere and been identified.
thank you for imedentially reply, but sorry it is not clear for me again , shant we do sequences of tenses here, that is … and was stolen???
The principal clause is
“that is the book”,
so the principal clause is in the present tense.
When the verb in the principal clause is in the present or future tense, the verb in the subordinate clause may be in any tense that the context requires. In this case - it requires the past tense.
Although it has not been written in that order, the time sequence is that the book was stolen first.
The book was stolen. That is the book (it has been found or recovered).
‘Which’ refers to the book and introduces a clause giving further information about the book. In this case the information is that the book was previously stolen.
That is my phone which was lost.
That is your jumper which went missing.
The principal clause is
“that is the book”, so the principal clause is in the present tense.
When the verb in the principal clause is in the present or future tense, the verb in the subordinate clause may be in any tense that the context requires. In this case - it requires the past tense.
thank you , everything is clear now
That’s the book that’s been stolen.
That would relate to:
That is the book that has been stolen.
‘has been’ would not be the most natural tense there in most situations, but it is possible.