S
Sam-F
Guest
Well, it's not quite as simple as I was pretending it was 
First, when you use the past perfect continuous to specify the amount of time something took, it doesn't necessarily mean the action finished (I know, I know, this is different from what I said earlier!). So
"I had been talking for two hours when I started to grow hoarse"
Doesn't necessarily mean that the person then stopped talking - it only means that the talking occurred before the person grew hoarse, and lasted for at least two hours.
In your example, I'd start by saying that he did indeed graduate before publishing the paper, but that's not the event that the past perfect is comparing it to: it's comparing it to two months after graduation. He published the paper before the two months were up.
But your second question is also interesting. I'd say that
"Only two months after graduation, he had published his first paper"
is very similar to
"Only two months after graduation, he published his first paper"
and that they could almost be used interchangably. However, to be precise about it, I'd say that the meaning of the first is that by the time two months were up he had published a paper, while the second one means that he published it exactly (or nearly exactly) two months later.
This difference is clearer, I think, in this example:
-A year after graduation he had published three papers, married a woman and built a house.
-A year after graduation he published three papers, married a woman and built a house.
In both cases the man is acting extremely fast (!), but the first one implies that he did all those things within the year, and the second one implies that he did those things all at once, at the end of the year.
...I think that these perfect tenses can be rather strange, and to tell the truth I only really do it by ear. I had to look them up to start saying clever things about "past perfect continuous" and the like!
First, when you use the past perfect continuous to specify the amount of time something took, it doesn't necessarily mean the action finished (I know, I know, this is different from what I said earlier!). So
"I had been talking for two hours when I started to grow hoarse"
Doesn't necessarily mean that the person then stopped talking - it only means that the talking occurred before the person grew hoarse, and lasted for at least two hours.
In your example, I'd start by saying that he did indeed graduate before publishing the paper, but that's not the event that the past perfect is comparing it to: it's comparing it to two months after graduation. He published the paper before the two months were up.
But your second question is also interesting. I'd say that
"Only two months after graduation, he had published his first paper"
is very similar to
"Only two months after graduation, he published his first paper"
and that they could almost be used interchangably. However, to be precise about it, I'd say that the meaning of the first is that by the time two months were up he had published a paper, while the second one means that he published it exactly (or nearly exactly) two months later.
This difference is clearer, I think, in this example:
-A year after graduation he had published three papers, married a woman and built a house.
-A year after graduation he published three papers, married a woman and built a house.
In both cases the man is acting extremely fast (!), but the first one implies that he did all those things within the year, and the second one implies that he did those things all at once, at the end of the year.
...I think that these perfect tenses can be rather strange, and to tell the truth I only really do it by ear. I had to look them up to start saying clever things about "past perfect continuous" and the like!
