two English grammatical questions! Thanks!

[rdearman]

If you read further down in the comments you'll see the reason why I believe you are wrong.

The Oxford University style guide, however, states: “Note that in British English, the word which is often used interchangeably with the restrictive that”.

Your rule is an American thing and doesn't apply to actual English, only to colonial English.

[Lianne]

If you read further down in the comments you'll see the reason why I believe you are wrong.

The Oxford University style guide, however, states: “Note that in British English, the word which is often used interchangeably with the restrictive that”.

Your rule is an American thing and doesn't apply to actual English, only to colonial English.

I don't know to what degree you're joking, lol, but I speak Canadian English and definitely consider "that" and "which" to have different meanings.

[StringerBell]

context:
(a story about a woman who finally had a baby in the past).She was ecstatic. She had wanted to be a mother forever.....I saw the joy in her face and i recognized it. This was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring, the day i discovered that the magazine i worked for was going to send me on assignment to Newzealand, ...

question:
why the tense shifted from past perfect to past: this was the exact joy my own face HAD RADIATED last spring. they day i DISCOVERED...i WORKED...
since it is an event some point in last spring, why not continuing with the past perfect?
what are the rules here?

"This was the exact joy my own face radiated last spring."
"This was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring."
"This was the exact joy my own face had been radiating last spring."
"This was the exact joy my own face was radiating last spring."

^^^ Those four example, in my opinion, all mean the same thing. The reason why an author chooses one version over another is a stylistic choice; in some situations, saying something a certain way sounds a little bit better than saying it another way. The author could have chosen to use the past perfect in this situation; it would not have been wrong (at least, I don't think it would have been wrong). But to my ears, "had radiated" just sounds a little bit better than "radiated". I don't think that there is any rule that says the author had to write that sentence in that exact way; the author chose to because it sounded right to him/her.

[aaleks]

There's a rule about the Past perfect. As they usually say in the regular EFL textbooks we are supposed to use the Past perfect when we are talking about something that happened before the Past simple. So from that rule's point of view the author really should have used "had radiated" in that sentence. What is confusing here is the part "...the day I discovered that the magazine I worked for was going to... ". Why the Past simple? Why didn't the author use here the Past perfect as well? I guess that was the OP question. I don't have an answer to the question because I've never learned the English grammar properly. Maybe there are some fancy/advanced textbooks where it's been explained. As someone who was reading books and watching TV in the language for 4 years without really learning grammar* I didn't find the sentence confusing because it sounds/looks okay to me. I'd even say that it would have felt wrong if the author used the Past perfect here. Maybe contracted forms would look okay though ("...the day I'd discovered that the magazine I'd worked for was had been ??? going to... "), I don't know, I am not native speaker. The thing is that if I were to follow the rule, as I understand it, I would feel that I had to continue with the Past perfect after "had radiated".
Putting the rule aside I have my own theory why "had radiated" sounds better for me in this context but it might be totally wrong. Either way that is exactly the problem I face almost every time I write something in English -- one variant feels right but I don't know why, the other one doesn't feel right but seems to fit the rule (any rule, not only the Past perfect vs Past simple).

*for example, at that time I knew that "was/were/been" are past forms of"am/is/are" but I'm not sure if I really knew such words like "Present perfect" . Maybe I knew, it's hard to tell now but I definitely didn't know what's the difference between the Present perfect, the Past simple, and the Past perfect tenses. All of them were something about the past to me.

[seito]

Personally, I would say that the point of reference in Q1 switches from the day the writer saw the woman to the present. Either way seems very natural.

For Q2, none of the options seem natural. I'd go with "Now here comes the part that was left out of the story."

EDIT: Past is probably better if the story about the woman was intended to introduce the other story. Past perfect may be better if the story about the woman who had the baby will continue to be the main topic.

[romeo.alpha]

context:
(a story about a woman who finally had a baby in the past).She was ecstatic. She had wanted to be a mother forever.....I saw the joy in her face and i recognized it. This was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring, the day i discovered that the magazine i worked for was going to send me on assignment to Newzealand, ...

question:
why the tense shifted from past perfect to past: this was the exact joy my own face HAD RADIATED last spring. they day i DISCOVERED...i WORKED...
since it is an event some point in last spring, why not continuing with the past perfect?
what are the rules here?

English works much more with temporal aspect than tense, and it's established through context. "Had radiated" indicates that the radiating has stopped. "Worked" was still on going at the point in the timeline that was being established (and who knows, maybe he's still working for that magazine, in which case "had worked" would simply be incorrect). It's "discovered" instead of "had discovered" because once you learn something you usually don't unlearn it. If you discovered something that later turned out to be incorrect, then you might say "had discovered".

Q2:
it is about the relative clause.

i have written a descriptive paragraph in simple present tense.
and the next sentence is going to be something like

A: now comes the part which was left out in the story.
B: now comes the part where it was left out in the story.
C: now comes the part which is left out in the story.
D: now comes the part where it is left out in the story.

which is/are correct?


Thanks.

B and D are wrong in this context, but in some other situations "where" is used kind of like that (often being synonymous with "in which", not just "which").
A and C could both work, but simply as a matter of logic only A is possible. Because if it is left out of the story (still, now), then you can't be introducing it right away. It was left out of the story, and after it is explained it had been left out of the story. If you want to split hairs, you could justify C from a grammatical perspective, but the only reason someone would actually say that is because people make small errors like that when they're explaining something in real time.

[romeo.alpha]

There's a rule about the Past perfect. As they usually say in the regular EFL textbooks we are supposed to use the Past perfect when we are talking about something that happened before the Past simple.

I've seen that also explained for French and German. With German I can say that not all tenses are actually used in speech, and speech doesn't seem to follow that rule. So to the extent it is true, it's only for writing. For English I can say that it's definitely not the case. That would either be a case of continental European languages applying their rules to English, or it might also be wrong for them and be one of the many annoying hold-overs from Latin grammar being falsely applied to other European languages.

[Iversen]

This was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring, the day i discovered that the magazine i worked for was going to send me on assignment to Newzealand, ...
question: why the tense shifted from past perfect to past

This is actually quite hard to explain (even for a curious non-native looking at the system from the outside)

The problem is not so much why "worked" is in the simple past tense as why the author's radiating should be put into the pluperfect. I think it has something to do with perspective: the author is looking back at the day where the message about the assignment came, and there recalls her feeling around that time. If she had written "This was the exact joy my own face radiated last spring" then the point of view is now, and she sees one singular event "the arrival of the assignment" that causes another singular event "her face started to radiate". But it is hard to explain why using precisely the pluperfect has this effect of 'smoothing out' the radiating event and turning it into a relived feeling rather than a terse statement of the effect of a cause. After all, the basic job of the pluperfect should be to tell about things that happened before other things...

[WildGinger10]

A: now comes the part which was left out in the story.
B: now comes the part where it was left out in the story.
C: now comes the part which is left out in the story.
D: now comes the part where it is left out in the story.

I'm just going to pop in my two cents here, since I haven't seen it acknowledged yet - while, as has been brought up, context is important here for the first part of the sentence, I think "left out in the story" is probably technically grammatically accurate but rings a little false to my native (American) English ear. For me, "left out of the story" sounds more correct. I don't know if there is an actual grammar rule about this, but this stood out to me.

[romeo.alpha]

A: now comes the part which was left out in the story.
B: now comes the part where it was left out in the story.
C: now comes the part which is left out in the story.
D: now comes the part where it is left out in the story.

I'm just going to pop in my two cents here, since I haven't seen it acknowledged yet - while, as has been brought up, context is important here for the first part of the sentence, I think "left out in the story" is probably technically grammatically accurate but rings a little false to my native (American) English ear. For me, "left out of the story" sounds more correct. I don't know if there is an actual grammar rule about this, but this stood out to me.

"Now comes the part in the story which was left out."

vs

"Now comes the part of the story which was left out."

I think you have a point. The second one also sounds better with this syntax. I'd be curious if any Brits see it differently. As far as a grammatical rule, I highly doubt there is a specific one. It's a preposition, and which preposition is right or wrong is a matter of convention.