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Can I say:

There has had...

instead of

There has been...

Can you explain to me the difference between both?

2 Answers 2

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It's probably pretty rare. I know I had to think pretty hard to come up with an example.

You can, however, use "There was..." instead of "There has been...":

There has been a major accident on the highway.
There was a major accident on the highway.

There has been a change in plans.
There was a change in a plans.

Generally speaking, the difference is this: we use "has been" when something has just happened very recently (just moments ago, and we are just now reporting on it), whereas we use "was" when something happened much longer ago (like yesterday, or last week).

"There has had" sounds almost ungrammatical to me, except perhaps in examples where the word there happens to be adjacent to has had, for example:

Who out there has had a chance to see that new Star Wars movie?
The government there has had to clamp down on a rash of new crime.

although I suppose nearly anything can be made grammatical in the right context:

Inevitably, there has had to be something at work.

Yet even that sounds a little awkward, and there is a good chance I'd massage it before using it in an article.

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"There has had" is unambiguously the present perfect of "there has". As far as I know "there has" is not idiomatic in English, and never has been. Therefore neither is "there has had".

"There has been", on the other hand, is the perfect of "there is", which is a very common phrase in English.

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  • "There has to be something you can do for her!" is idiomatic, though far from the only way to express that. Still, of course, backshifting that kind of usage is very rare and sounds unnatural. Jul 22, 2018 at 12:29

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