What's the difference between these two examples:
1."Your father would be proud of us."
2."Your father would have been proud of us."
Learn English – “Would have been” Vs “Would be”
differencesubjunctiveswill-would
Related Solutions
Let's look at a few more sentences in the same tense (present perfect) as your first example:
Mary has eaten the cake.
I have finished the report.
Someone has taken my phone.
In each case the first phrase of the sentence is the doer of the action (Mary does the eating, I do the finishing, someone does the taking.)
From this it is clear that your first example does not make sense (although it is grammatically correct). An idea cannot do the deleting. It does make sense, however, to say: Someone has deleted the idea (actually, deleted the file would be a better example).
Your second sentence, on the other hand, is both grammatical and makes sense. It is in the passive form of the same tense. If we convert the examples above to the passive, then we get:
The cake has been eaten (by Mary).
The report has been finished (by me).
My phone has been taken (by someone).
Your second sentence fits in here:
The file has been deleted (by somebody).
We use the passive like this when we want to shift the focus of the sentence away from the doer of the action. Maybe we don't know who did the action, or it is obvious, or we don't care who did it. The passive allows us to focus on what happened and does not require us to mention the doer.
I agree with Vic, and would like to add a little more information.
The main point of the question is the difference between the tenses of "have been playing" and "have played". In addition to the tenses, we have the verb "play (tennis)", which is a dynamic verb (dynamic verbs have duration; they occur over time), and we also have the time phrase "for five years".
Different combinations of verb, tense, and time phrase will allow different ranges of possible readings.
Let's consider the first sentence:
(1) I have been playing tennis for five years.
The tense is the perfect progressive tense. The time phrase indicates the duration (five years). The combination of the tense and the time phrase forces us to read it as: "I have been playing tennis for five years now." This gives us the reading that the activity has been going on for five years up until now. It also implies that the activity will keep continuing, at least in the immediate future.
(2) I have played tennis for five years.
The tense is the simple perfect tense. The time phrase is, again, for five years. However, the sentence is different from (1). It doesn't force us to read the time part as "for five years now". It's unclear exactly when in the past that the speaker have played tennis. All we know is it happened before now, at least five years before now. (In other words, it's possible to read the sentence as "At some point in my life, I've played tennis for five years.") It's unclear whether it has ended or not. It's also possible that it's been continued up until now, and possibly will continue into the future. The speaker says nothing explicitly, so we have a wider range of possible readings.
Having said that, the preferred reading, out of context, is: "I have played tennis for five years now." Which means about the same thing as (1). When we read both alternatives as "for five years now", the difference is really small. To demonstrate such a small difference, these examples can be helpful:
How long have you been playing tennis?
I've been playing tennis for five years.Do you know how to play tennis?
Of course, I've played tennis for five years.
I hope this helps to clarify the difference!
Best Answer
In the first example, the second conditional expresses a hypothesis on a present situtation, imagining an impossible or unlikely event.
It might as well imply he is dead, or simply away.
In the second example, the third conditional expresses a hypothesis on a past situation.
We don't know if the father is dead now or even if he was dead at the time of the past action. We only know he was not there and so it was impossible for him to feel proud of us.