Timeline for Perfect Continuous Aspect
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 17 at 23:05 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Jun 19 at 20:08 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Feb 20 at 20:01 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Oct 23, 2023 at 19:05 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 15:46 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @brp7: Your link includes the potentially misleading statement We use the past perfect continuous to show that something started in the past and continued up until another time in the past. What they mean is and was still ongoing, not and then stopped. As pointed out in my second comment, past perfect continuous tells us something started before, and was still ongoing at some time in the past. It says nothing about whether/when the activity stopped - that can only be determined by context and pragmatics. | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 15:38 | comment | added | BumbleBee | @FumbleFingers "He was tired because he had been exercising so hard. This sentence emphasizes that he was tired because he had been exercising over a period of time. It is possible that he was still exercising at that moment OR that he had just finished. source: englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfectcontinuous.html | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 14:33 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I already said in my first comment that #2 carries the very strong implication that he will have finished exercising by the time we meet him. Your ideas about "Perfect Continuous" implying anything about whether / when the specified action stops are mistaken, as made clear by my second comment. What else is still confusing you? | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 14:24 | comment | added | BumbleBee | @FumbleFingers Fully agree with you. It should be past continuous. Appreciate it if you could look into the other two. 1) By evening, I will have been practicing for two hours. 2) I will have been cutting the grass in my yard for a while when you arrive. | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 13:13 | answer | added | TimR on some device | timeline score: 1 | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 12:59 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Syntactically, I can't see that when 9/11 happened is any different to, say, yesterday as a noun phrase identifying some specific time in the past. So just as you can't start a conversation with I had been working from home yesterday, it's not obvious to me what context you have in mind to justify using Past Perfect I had been working in the office when 9/11 happened. | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 6:11 | comment | added | Sam | @brp7 It implies (you have not yet completed the two hours of practice; you are currently in the process of practicing,)and you will continue to do so until the evening, at which point you will have practiced for two hours. | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 6:04 | comment | added | BumbleBee | @Sam 2) I will have been cutting the grass in my yard for a while when you arrive. (I intend to cut the grass even after your arrival.) | |
| Sep 23, 2023 at 6:03 | comment | added | BumbleBee | @fumblefingers The confusion arises as the perfect continuous aspect is the stopping of an ongoing action. Can we say future perfect continuous expresses some duration of an event before it stops OR another event interrupts it (the first may continue as well) I have made some other examples where the first action may continue. 1) By evening, I will have been practicing for two hours. (By evening, I will have finished two hours of practice, but I will still continue practicing after the evening.) cont. | |
| Sep 22, 2023 at 16:35 | comment | added | Kate Bunting | I happened to be at home on 9/11, but I was recently talking about it with a former colleague and she said that they had all stopped work in our office when the shocking news came through. So the first sentence could mean that the writer broke off from that day's work, not that they left their job. | |
| Sep 22, 2023 at 16:08 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | ...but the semantics of something like I had been living in the UK for several years before I applied for citizenship very strongly implies I continued to live there afterwards. Whereas We had been "living in sin" for several years before we got married obviously entails (forces the interpretation) that we didn't continue living sin after the mentioned activity. And if you say I've been here all day, that obviously can't imply you've left (and probably doesn't imply you're about to leave either). Context is everything, | |
| Sep 22, 2023 at 15:46 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | #1 looks highly suspect to me. We'd need a much more complete context (of preceding text) to be definitive, but almost certainly it would be better to say I was working in the office when 9/11 happened. Note that #2 carries the very strong implication that he will have finished exercising by the time we meet him. If that wasn't the intention, it would be ...because he will be exercising so hard (which is "agnostic" as to whether he will stop exercising as soon as we arrive). | |
| Sep 22, 2023 at 15:34 | comment | added | Sam | What's your doubt?? | |
| Sep 22, 2023 at 15:27 | history | asked | BumbleBee | CC BY-SA 4.0 |