You {did not move/have not moved} your car... there {would not/will not} have been... - which choice is correct?

Question

I have these examples:

1. Given you did not move your car away from my garage door by next weekend as you promised there wouldn't have been any change in your behaving.

and

2. Given you have not moved your car away from my garage door by next weekend as you promised there will haven't been any change in your behaving.

Imagine: John, known for bad behaviour, promising (under the pretext he will change his bad behaviour) Paul he would move the car away from his garage door this coming weekend, but after the deadline John didn't do it and Paul seized this opportunity to say John he didn't change at all— would you apply one of my examples to this situation?

Focusing on "have not moved/did not move" and "would not have been/will not have been" part, given the sentence is conditioned in future actions, are these sentence grammatical? If not, are they at least clearly semantically understood?

Answer 1

First, your behaving is not idiomatic: use your behavio(u)r.

Secondly, there will haven't been is ungrammatical. Contractions like haven't are used only when the have is the head (tensed) verb, not when it is dependent on another auxiliary. This needs to be there won't (will not) have been. Edit: actually, the point is that it is the first element in a complex verb phrase that gets negated, not a later one.

Thirdly, if you haven't moved it by next weekend, you can't possibly conclude anything about their behaviour, since that deadline hasn't yet been reached. I'm guessing you meant by the next weekend, which means "by the next weekend after you promised" as opposed to by next weekend, which means "by the weekend after now".

As to the substantive question: the first one is inconsequential. Given you did not ... is a real (not a counterfactual) conditional, so a simple tense would be expected in the consequent: there wasn't any change in your behaviour.

There wouldn't have been is possible here, but suggests a degree of tentativeness, a less categorical statement than there wasn't.

In the second one, the have not moved is inconsistent with by next weekend. The "present perfect" relates an event to the present, but specifying a time limit is inconsistent with that (unless it were by now, i.e. the present).

The amended there won't have been any change in your behaviour is grammatical and makes sense here, but it is not necessary: it is moving the temporal viewpoint to the future for some unclear reason.

So the grammatical and meaningful form of these would be:

Given that you did not move your car away from my garage door by the next weekend, as you promised, there wasn't any change in your behaviour.

wouldn't be, won't have been are both possible, with slightly different meanings.

Answer 2

I'll try to keep it simple. First, here's a grammatical version that gives the meaning you want. (It's not the only grammatical version; there are some other possibilities.)

Given that you have not moved your car away from my garage door by the day you promised to, there hasn't been any change in your behaviour.

Now, let's look closely at the verb tenses. They can tell us the order in time that events happen, and they can tell us about whether they really did happen or are just wishes or ideas.

Let's start with "there _____ any change in your behaviour." I would not choose a future tense here, because I am talking about what just happened. Or what didn't happen: John didn't change. I might use a future tense if I'm talking about the future: "I hope there will be a change in your behavior, but I fear there will not have been one even by a year from now."

• "There was not any change in your behaviour" would not be wrong. This is simple past tense. It talks about something that happened (or, this time, didn't happen) in the past.
• "There has not" (or hasn't) "been any change" is a bit better. This is present perfect. It's confusing; it also talks about the past, but it says something about how the past affects the present (for more, see other questions on this site about "present perfect"). I would choose this because "today," while I'm talking to John, the change that he never made matters to who he is now and how I trust him.
• "There wouldn't have been any change in your behavior": This is not a good choice for this situation. "Would" is often used in "conditionals"; constructions that say something about what would happen "if" something else happened. "I would move my car if you paid me." They can work in the negative too: "I wouldn't move my car if you paid me." The situation we're talking about in this question might feel like it has an "if," but if it did in the past, it doesn't have one now. In the past, Paul might have said "If you were to move your car by next week, I would say your behaviour has changed." But now, the deadline has passed, the moving has not happened, and Paul is sure that John has not changed; there is no more "if" about it.

For the first verb, "have not moved" vs "did not move": this is another choice between simple past and present perfect. Again, simple past would be okay: "Given that you didn't move your car." It's not wrong; John did not move the car. But again, I chose past perfect instead just because that past action matters in the present. Saying "you haven't moved your car" talks about the situation today: it's a situation in which the moving hasn't happened.