Learn English – Future Pluperfect Tense

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I was reading this question Future pluperfect and was really interested in how real is the Future Pluperfect tense.

I found this information:

The Future Pluperfect: Double Tenses in American English Auxiliaries

This is from "The Future Pluperfect: Double Tenses in American English Auxiliaries" by Carole E. Chaski. American Speech. Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 3-20

The interesting part is the sentence:

  • John will had run the race by the time we arrive.

Is this information true? can we indeed use the Future Pluperfect tense the way it's used here?

Best Answer

It's not standard English. The article says that it's from a North Carolina (U.S. Southern) dialect.

There are many, many regional variations on standard English grammar and vocabulary, often called "dialects". They're usually not accepted in formal writing for a broad audience. Schools usually teach children to avoid the nonstandard words and grammar, at least in a formal setting; more here.

The article is mainly concerned with how to explain "double auxiliaries" in terms of transformational grammar. Simplifying for brevity: This is a theory that all grammars of all human languages are instances of a single, mathematically pristine set of rules for generating all possible grammatical sentences. This "universal grammar" is postulated to have various "switches" that different languages turn on and off, accounting for the differences between different languages' grammars. If you're thinking that this is a dubious theory, you're not alone, but this is a matter on which people can reasonably disagree. Anyway, for the theory to be true, the postulated transformational grammar must be able to generate every possible grammatical sentence in all languages and all their dialectal variations, and be unable to generate any ungrammatical sentence in any language or dialect (given appropriate switch-settings). If the nonstandard grammar of the North Carolina dialect allows a sentence that the leading transformational grammar can't generate, this is evidence disproving the theory or else requiring that the transformational grammar be modified to include it. The article is mostly concerned with how to make this revision. From p. 12:

…given McCawley's framework, the difference between the standard dialect and the double perfective dialect can be captured as a difference in the ordering of the two cyclic rules, Tense-Replacement and Attraction-to-Tense. Since these rules are both cyclic, either can apply. In the standard dialect, Tense Replacement precedes Attraction-to-Tense; in the double perfective dialect, Attraction-to-Tense can precede Tense Replacement. This alternative ordering generates both the will had and will have had forms.

So, the information is true, but it does not mean that the future pluperfect is standard English.

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