0

Today (Sunday):

P1: "Let's go to the cinema"

P2: "Oh! sorry. I had to go home"

Tomorrow (Monday):

P3: "Did you go to the cinema yesterday?"

P2: "My friend invited me, but ..."

How should I express being forced in the past? Should I say "but I did had to go home" or "but I was had to go home" or what?

What about being forced at the future?

P1: "Will you go to the cinema tomorrow?"

P2: "I want to go, but I ..."

Is this correct? "but I will had to go somewhere"

Improve this question
1
  • Why did your friend say "I had to go home"? That's very odd: it implies that at that time the obligation to go home lay in the past, before the invitation and before the screening.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 12:09

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Technically, P2 does not directly respond to P1. There is some implied extra meaning hidden in P2's first sentence. When P2 says "Sorry. I had to go home", they mean "Sorry. I had to go home, so I will not be able to go to the cinema."

(I am assuming you meant P2 in the second group of sentences where you have P1.)

The second group would turn out something like:

P3: Did you go to the cinema yesterday?

P2: My friend invited me, but I had to go home.

It's the same conjugation ("had"). Why? Because both sentences are referring to the past — in both cases, P2 has already had to go home before they speak. Therefore both sentences can use the same conjugation.

For the third pair of sentences, you could complete them with:

P1: Will you go to the cinema tomorrow?

P2: I want to go, but I have to go somewhere else instead.

"Have" refers to the future here; "I have to go somewhere" means "In the future, I will be moving to a different place that prevents me from going to the cinema with you."

If you want, you could also write:

P2: I want to go, but I will have to go somewhere.

This indicates more strongly that P2 will be leaving for "somewhere" at an indiscriminate point in the future. (Note that not specifying a specific location here would be seen by a native English speaker as P2 rudely attempting to get out of going to the cinema with P1.)

Improve this answer
3
  • Thank you for reply! But how can I know the tense of the sentence if it was alone? I mean, what is the meaning of this sentence? "I had to go home." This means "I had to go home now" or "I had to go home yesterday"?
    – lucas
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 4:55
  • @lucas "I had to go home" effectively means "I had to go home before right now." The verb "had" in this case is simple past tense: it means that the action it describes ("to go home", in this case) was done before the moment the sentence was uttered.
    – Pierce Darragh
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 4:59
  • @lucas If you wanted to say that the speaker is required to leave now (and not before), they would say "I have to go home now" (instead of "had").
    – Pierce Darragh
    Commented Jul 5, 2016 at 5:01

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .