The future perfect tense is a state of potential that can cause anxiety. Verbs express action in past, present, and future, and languages have different ways of discussing them. In English, the future perfect can be formed with “will have” or “going to have” and the past participle.
The average man or woman on the street might think that the perfect future is the goal of life. Someone who works hard and saves money, someone who chooses a kind and devoted mate, or someone who gets lucky and wins the lottery is guaranteed a future that will be perfect. The future perfect, however, is not a stress-free state, rather it is indeed a very tense state. This is because it is a tense.
Unsurprisingly, the future doesn’t really exist. It is a state of potential, for some, a state that suggests hope and, for others, anxiety. In all languages, verbs are how things are done in sentences. They are words for action or movement, and since things have happened in the past, are happening right now, and will happen in the future, every language has a way of expressing these three time periods by how the verb is formed.
Anyone over the age of two knows that sometimes life gets complicated. Things are not always clear, and expressing them requires fine precision because they are not broad states of being. This means that most languages have different ways of discussing action in the past, present and future.
In English, this tense manifests itself in two ways. Ultimately, both express identical meanings; however, they do offer speaker options. The first choice is to combine the past participle of the action verb with “will have”. The second case is slightly more complex. It is formed by combining the present tense of “to be” with the phrase “going to have” and the past participle of the action verb.
An example of the former, also called a pluperfect, might be uttered by a parent trying to reassure an anxious child about a trip. “By the time you get home from camp, you’ll have learned everything there is to know about camping!” While in some cases the simple past is formed in the same way as the past participle, this is not always the case. This means, for example, that a future perfect statement about eating something would be stated “You will have eaten” and not “You will have eaten”.
The second case of future perfect is both more complicated and less graceful. It’s not even used that often, but when it is, the meaning is the same. The parent might tell the child, “By the time you come back from camp, you’ll have learned all about coyotes,” and the hungry individual will be certain that he “will have eaten” by that point in time.
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