English
In English, the tense is formed thus:
| subject | + | shall, will |
+ | have | + | past participle |
| I | shall | have | gone." |
This is sometimes shortened with the contraction of 'll for shall or will: I'll have been hit, you'll have been paid, etc. To make this form negative, one simply adds not between will or shall and have. For the contracted form, will not becomes won't and shall not becomes shan't: I won't have been speaking, you shan't have been speaking, etc.
The English future perfect places the action relative only to the absolute future reference point but provides no information on location in time relative to the present : for example, If it rains tomorrow, we will have worked in vain yesterday.
The time of perspective of the English future perfect can be shifted from the present to the past by replacing will with its past tense form would, thus effectively creating a "past of the future of the past" construction in which the indicated event or situation occurs before a time that occurs after the past time of perspective (but the event or situation must occur after the time of perspective): In 1982, I knew that by 1986 I would have already gone to prison.
Unlike the English present perfect, the future perfect permits the use of a specific time marker for the action: I will have done it on the previous Tuesday is correct, while the present perfect formulation I have done it last Tuesday is incorrect.
An obsolete term found in old grammars for the English future perfect is the "second future tense."
Read more about this topic: Future Perfect
Famous quotes containing the word english:
“What else has been English news for so long a season? What else, of late years, has been England to us,—to us who read books, we mean?... Carlyle alone, since the death of Coleridge, has kept the promise of England. It is the best apology for all the bustle and the sin of commerce, that it has made us acquainted with the thoughts of this man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.”
—Seventeenth-century English proverb, collected in Outlandish Proverbs, George Herbert (1640)
“English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.”
—Marilyn Butler (b. 1937)