A full-dress review of the perfect tenses (4)

TO complete our full-dress review of the perfect tenses, we will now take up the future perfect tense. We will do so to correct the third faulty conclusion about this tense that was presented Miss Mae, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, in her rejoinder to my column last December 5. Her understanding was that the future perfect is used “when the action still has to be completed in the future.”

This description of the future perfect misses out on this crucial aspect: the completion of the future action or event should be with respect to another future action or point in time. To get a better sense of this, imagine that we have traveled in time and are now looking back at actions or events that will be completed after the present time (the here and now). Indeed, the future perfect will be a kind of present tense from the viewpoint of the future instead of the present.