past perfect tense; pluperfect
A grammatical term referring to the tense that expresses an action completed before another past action. Used in linguistic or language-learning contexts.
大過去は過去完了とも呼ばれる。
The pluperfect is also called the past perfect.
大過去は、過去のある時点より前に起こったことを表す。
The past perfect tense expresses something that happened before a certain point in the past.
現在完了 is the present perfect tense, connecting past actions to the present, whereas 大過去 connects an earlier past action to a later past action.
Compound of 大 (great) and 過去 (past), literally 'great past'. The term is a direct translation of the Western grammatical concept of pluperfect.