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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 ...
A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: The base form or plain form ( go, write, climb ), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular. The -s form ( goes, writes, climbs ), used as the present indicative in the third-person singular.
The word perfect in this sense means "completed" (from Latin perfectum, which is the perfect passive participle of the verb perficere "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated -verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of ...
v. t. e. In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations ...
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.
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]
Shall. and. will. Shall and will are two of the English modal verbs. They have various uses, including the expression of propositions about the future, in what is usually referred to as the future tense of English. Historically, prescriptive grammar stated that, when expressing pure futurity (without any additional meaning such as desire or ...
Common tenses of this type are the pluperfect and the future perfect. These both place the situation in the past relative to the reference point (they are anterior tenses), but in addition they place the reference point in the past and in the future, respectively, relative to the time of speaking. For example, "John had left" implies that the ...