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The pluperfect and future perfect forms combine perfect aspect with past and future tense respectively. This analysis is reflected more explicitly in the terminology commonly used in modern English grammars, which refer to present perfect, past perfect and future perfect (as well as some other constructions such as conditional perfect).
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as will have finished in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect ...
In addition to the six main tenses of the indicative mood, there are four main tenses in the subjunctive mood and two in the imperative mood. Participles in Latin have three tenses (present, perfect, and future). The infinitive has two main tenses (present and perfect) as well as a number of periphrastic tenses used in reported speech.
Pluperfect. The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect ), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we had arrived " before the game began; "they had been writing " when the bell rang.
A related, and more complex, tense is the future perfect in the past, which is also known as the conditional perfect. Here, an event is situated before a reference point, which in turn is in the future relative to another point in the past: John left for the front; by the time he should return, the fields would have been burnt to stubble.
Prophetic perfect tense. The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique commonly used in religious texts, [ 1] which describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened. [ 2]
Grammatical tense. In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. [ 1][ 2] Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and ...
The past perfect, sometimes called the pluperfect, combines past tense with perfect aspect; it is formed by combining had (the past tense of the auxiliary have) with the past participle of the main verb. It is used when referring to an event that took place prior to the time frame being considered. [10]