The future perfect progressive is a tense that combines a future reference with a continuous form for a verb. It is important for English learners to understand and often contrasts one future moment with another. It can be confusing due to its ambiguities, but instructors can explain it effectively through diagrams.
The future perfect progressive is a specific tense in English that combines a future reference with a continuous form for a verb. The future perfect progressive is one of the few future tenses that is important for English language learners to understand. Corresponds to other progressive tenses that use the suffix “ing” to transform verbs into a progressive or continuous form.
An example of a future perfect progressive statement demonstrates the elements that make this tense unique. An English speaker might say, “After New Year’s, I’ll be working on this project for two months.” Here, listeners can identify the future perfect progressive from the words “will have been,” combined with the verb “to work,” in its continuous form: “to work.”
This verb tense includes several main elements or components. First, the speaker or writer is communicating from a future moment, in the above case, New Year’s Eve’s point of view, rather than from the moment they are at when they are expressing themselves. What is also common to future perfect progressive usages is that the future moment is contrasted with another moment, often the present moment, through the use of the continuous or progressive.
It is important to know that in most uses of the future perfect progressive, it is not clear, from the context of the sentence, what the present moment is for the speaker or the writer. What is clear is that the speaker or writer is contrasting one future moment to another moment that could be in the future, present or past. In the example above, that time is set two months before New Year’s, or in other words, at the end of October. Despite this context, it is not clear to the reader or listener whether the speaker’s statement comes before, after, or at this moment.
Another feature of the future perfect progressive is that many sentences using this tense do not indicate a future stopping point for the verb in question. Again, in the previous example, the speaker does not make it clear that the verb, in this case “to work”, will cease at some point. The statement is more of a reference to a chronological landmark as to when the action started. The ambiguities of this tense are part of what makes it confusing for language learners; through sketching a timeline and diagramming the chronological points of this time, instructors can often explain its nature effectively.
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