Future Perfect
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The most recent SMBC:
The mouseover title: "We will have had peace immediately!"
The AfterComic:
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April 7, 2026 @ 3:32 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
« previous post | next post »
The most recent SMBC:
The mouseover title: "We will have had peace immediately!"
The AfterComic:
April 7, 2026 @ 3:32 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI
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JPL said,
April 7, 2026 @ 5:03 pm
"The war will have been over by some future point (in the not-too-distant future)."
"Our forces will have been wrapping up their subversive activities by that point."
There needs to be a definite future reference point after which the event described by the main verb occurs, not just an indication of indefinite (future) duration. That event itself does not have to be in the future wrt the speech event. I remember Margaret Thatcher reporting on a British operation in the Falklands war, saying of it, "There will have been casualties." The event described is past wrt the act of speaking, but the discovery of the truth or falsity of the claim is future wrt to it: the event of confirmation. Predictions about past events: not an uncommon message. (Of course, the tense in this VP is non-past; and the modal really does have to do more with the confirmation than the event described by the main verb, the possibility of the confirmation. You're in the house, there's a ring of the doorbell. You formulate the sentence, "That will be the postman": the postman (or not the postman) is already there; it's the confirmation that is in the future.)
Barbara Phillips Long said,
April 7, 2026 @ 5:07 pm
The Saturday Night Live cold open ("Trump's Gas Prices") featured a Trump impersonator saying:
"We love to make promises because a promise is just a lie that hasn't happened yet."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj-RQ1Y-Dgk
(Season 51, Episode 15, March 14, 2026; Harry Styles guest host)
HS said,
April 7, 2026 @ 7:47 pm
How is it "continuous"? Obviously Donald Trump's lies and crimes and delusions are continuous and ongoing, and there seems no prospect of that changing any time soon, if ever, and there is obviously nothing that the citizens of the non-deranged world such as myself can do about it, but grammatically "the war will have been over soon" isn't continuous, is it?
JPL said,
April 7, 2026 @ 8:15 pm
See my second example above: that is the "continuous" form (i.e., progressive aspect, in addition to the perfect.
D.O. said,
April 7, 2026 @ 8:43 pm
Right. But the true art is to make a passive out of it. "The war will have been being over soon."
HS said,
April 7, 2026 @ 9:01 pm
"Our forces will have been wrapping up their subversive activities by that point."
Yes, I agree, that is continuous, i.e. progressive aspect, even if obviously factually untrue (the wrapping up, that is, not the subversive activities).
JPL said,
April 7, 2026 @ 11:56 pm
@HS:
Linguistic examples are constructed with the intention of being just "system- sentences", expressions "generated by the grammar", not normal acts of language use (also called "text-sentences"). So they're not intended to be judged true or false the way normal acts of language use are treated. The sentences do not even have to be about the current Iran situation. E.g., D.O.'s sentence above could be, "By Friday the war (if it hasn't ended) will have been being fought for fifty days." doesn't have to be factual to be a good example; it just has to be a possible sentence generated (able to be produced) by the assumed grammatical rules.
Seonachan said,
April 8, 2026 @ 7:16 am
I once got a fortune cookie that said: “You will have a very bright future.”
I still don’t know if my future is bright yet.
Michael Watts said,
April 8, 2026 @ 7:56 am
On this point, CGEL does not state that there is any connection to "the future" at all (it distinguishes several basic uses of will of which one is "epistemic" and another is "futurity"), and I tend to agree. You can talk about the future using modal will, but it doesn't follow that using modal will means you're talking about the future.
As to the comic, like HS, I was bothered by the fact that the "future perfect continuous tense" in the comic is not continuous.
I'm also bothered by the fact that there is very clearly no advantage, political or technical, to the politician for saying "the war will have been over soon" over "the war will be over soon". If either is true, so is the other. Only one is grammatical in the depicted context, and it's not the depicted one.
HS said,
April 8, 2026 @ 6:06 pm
@JPL
I fully understand everything you say, and fully understood it when I wrote my comment. When I wrote "even if factually untrue" I wasn't making any kind of grammatical or linguistic point, I was just taking the opportunity to sneak in a bit of political commentary (that is entirely in keeping with the subject matter of the cartoon)!
JPL said,
April 9, 2026 @ 2:18 am
@HS:
That's fine. I would say maybe you could have expressed everything in a different way. Don't feel you have to "sneak in" the political commentary if you want to express it. As far as I'm concerned, you can just brazenly and blatantly put it right out there, maybe preferably distinguishable from the linguistic content. (The blog curators might have a different position.) It's usually the right wing commenters that complain about political content, for some reason. In my opinion, the big problem we have these days wrt public discourse is media centrism. It's not helpful or appropriate; the last time it maybe was was the period between the McCarthy era and the Viet Nam war and civil rights movement. What we have now is not polarisation, a term that mixes together different phenomena, so much as the disjointness of public discourse communities. Discourse communities are kind of like speech communities; people are all using the same linguistic speech community norms, but the communities of people who are speaking with each other are disjoint. Apart from the differences in political behavior, there is a significant increasing difference in "ways of speaking", including what you might call "intellectual style". (That didn't happen so much with old-school "conservatives".) I think we need people from different discourse communities doing more talking to each other (civilly, of course), not shying away and avoiding the problems. For example, in the case of this cartoon, Donald Trump apparently does not need this device. In one sentence he can appear to express his belief that this Iran war is over; and then in the next sentence he can appear to express his belief that the war is not over, with no mention of how the two beliefs are related, not even a "however" or a "nevertheless". Then he will say that it will all be over in about two weeks' time. Or maybe starting again in two weeks' time. Is this normal language use? Why does he do that? BTW, I think he did mean "excursion", like a day-trip, not "incursion", as some people were saying.
This cartoon also has a lot of linguistic problems, like the phrase "the future perfect continuous tense" and its use of the term 'tense'. This is old usage, where the term 'tense' is ambiguous. That's actually what I meant to comment on when I started here.
HS said,
April 9, 2026 @ 7:29 pm
@JPL
I'm personally quite happy with the traditional term "tense" to describe the various forms of English verb phrases in an informal context – 'I am walking" (present continuous tense), "I had walked" (past perfect tense), etc. Though I might balk at describing "the car would have been being driven" as the conditional past perfect continuous passive tense. And yes, I fully understand the issues involved. (Well OK, I certainly wouldn't claim to fully understand all the issues involved if you get into the technical details of Dependency Grammars or something, but at the level that you're talking about I understand the issues involved.)
Michael Watts said,
April 9, 2026 @ 8:28 pm
It's a little weirder than that. The traditional term "tense" includes past time, perfect aspect, and continuous aspect. But it doesn't include conditionality (which is "mood") or passivity (which is "voice").
It's not clear to me why aspect got folded into the traditional concept, since it is quite clearly an independent dimension of variation in Latin, the language from which all of our traditional terms originate. It's a dimension with two values, but that's equally true of voice and almost as true of mood.
In modern Mandarin they have an active structure and a passive structure, and they think of them as participating in a three-way contrast between these alternatives:
(subject) (verb) (object) [active] 某人 打了 我 ["somebody hit me"]
(object) (passive marker) (subject, optional) (verb) [passive] 我 被 人 打了 ["somebody hit me"]
(subject) 把 (object) (verb) [ba] 某人 把 我 打了 ["somebody hit me", but "me" precedes "hit"]
I've always been curious what the technical term for the ba-structure is supposed to be. It's a voicing contrast as far as native speakers are concerned. Grammatically, it converts the object of the verb (which ordinarily follows the verb) to being the object of a preposition (since those precede the verb), a special preposition whose meaning is "the object of this preposition is the direct object of the verb that governs it". The structure is shared by all sentences that involve prepositions-as-arguments-to-verbs (我为我女儿买了裙子 I – for – my – daughter – bought – skirt, "I bought a skirt for my daughter"), so I guess this could be seen as "lexical voice" indicated by the meaning of 把.