English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Which one is correct? I know the present perfect continuous tense is for what. My question is here that we should use that tense when we want to say "I was here (a city) for ten years and now I am here as well" we must use the present perfect continuous but we use the present perfect (I've seen in the grammar books):
I have been here for ten years.
vs.
I have been being here for ten years.
I have been being here is not idiomatic.
You have probably learned that there is a category of verbs which are only very rarely used in with the progressive/continuous construction: stative verbs like be, know, live, see which express a state rather than an action or event. These verbs have the fundamental sense of a continuing state (which is what the progressive/continuous construction expresses) built into their meanings, so the progressive/continuous is superfluous.
For the same reason these verbs are rarely used with the progressive/continuous perfect construction. Indeed, there is even stronger pressure to avoid the progressive/continuous perfect, because the perfect is also inherently stative: it designates a state which came into being as a result of a prior action or event.
Saying I have been being here for ten years thus adds nothing to the sense of I have been being here for ten years, so we don't say it.
Furthermore: These "rules", like most "rules" of grammar, are not absolute: there are exceptions. But lexical be (that is, be as a main verb, not a component of the progressive or passive construction) is exceptionally resistant to exception, because it is the most "stative" of verbs: it ordinarily expresses nothing beyond a particular state. In consequence, when lexical be is cast in the progressive construction it usually has a different meaning, approximately "temporarily behave":
"John is being a jerk" does not mean that John is a jerk but that John is behaving like a jerk right now.
I have been being here for ten years.
While I believe this is technically grammatical (in terms of syntax alone), it is essentially never used, and so is ungrammatical for all practical purposes.
You can, however, use a different verb that would impart almost the same meaning and be acceptable:
I have been existing here for ten years.
