Tory Wolf
I have a question about this sentence: «He will probably have gone home» What kind of grammatical structure is this? It looks like a Future Perfect (will have + past participle), but this sentence is about the past, so I’m confused and would like to read about this grammar, but couldn’t figure out how to google it.
21 déc. 2023 22:16
Réponses · 10
2
You’re right about the type of grammatical structure. Typically it is used to refer to events in the present or future. ‘You could call him but he will probably have gone home’ : if you call him you may find that he has gone home. ‘We could go to his office but, by the time we get there, he will probably have gone home’ : he may be there now, but may well not be there when we arrive. Both these statements involve uncertainty due to ‘probably’, but the use of this structure can be more assertive : ‘You could call him but he will have gone home’ : the expectation is that he won’t be there, but you cannot be sufficiently certain to say ‘You could call him but he has gone home’. There is still a margin of uncertainty. When the event is still in the future the structure is not used to allow uncertainty but to assert that something will happen : ‘ ‘We could go to his office but, by the time we get there, he will have gone home’ : he may be there now, but will not be there when we arrive. We can’t say ‘. . by the time we get there he has gone home’ because, at the time of speaking, he has not yet gone home - it is still in the future.
21 décembre 2023
I will explain this using only the meanings of the words. I will not mention any tenses. Those tenses are really just common word patterns. If you understand the meaning of the words, you don't need to know about the tenses. "Gone home" means "experience of going home". You can use the word "history" instead of "experience" if you like. "Gone home" behaves like a noun because "experience" is a noun. So when you say "she has gone home" it means she has (possesses) "going home" as an experience. It is all present tense. Though the event happened in the past, she has the experience right now. The sentence "He will probably have chocolate" is quite easy to understand. Your sentence is grammatically the same. It is not more difficult. You don't need tenses to explain it. Just substitute "gone home" = "experience of going home" for chocolate: "He will probably have going home as an experience." Said in another way, "he will probably be able to say I remember going home".
22 décembre 2023
hii
23 décembre 2023
Hi Tory!!
22 décembre 2023
The sentence "He will probably have gone home" is indeed an example of the future perfect tense. The future perfect tense is used to describe an action that will be completed at some point in the future before another action or time. In this case, the speaker is predicting that at some point in the future, he (the person in question) will have completed the action of going home. The use of "will" indicates the future aspect, and "have gone" is the past participle construction that forms the future perfect tense. The confusion may arise because the sentence is discussing a future completion of an action, even though the action itself (going home) is in the past relative to the future point of reference. It's a future perspective on a completed past action. If you're looking for more information or examples, you can search for "future perfect tense" or "future perfect tense with future time reference" to find resources that explain this aspect of English grammar.
22 décembre 2023
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