will have had gone

[Nortaneous]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3824

Is this an actual thing, a weird regionalism, or just people on the internet not paying attention and fucking up? I've never heard it and can't parse it at all, but apparently it's fine for some people.

[Ziz]

It sounds legit to me. I think it's just rare. The future perfect is rare enough, so the "future pluperfect" is even more so.

[Shm Jay]

After reading the example in your link, I can tell you it’s ungrammatical for "will have gone". Future perfect isn’t used too much in English now, and future perfect passive even less, so no wonder people get confused about what the correct form is.

[Hakaku]

Google shows 123,000,000 results on the first page, 254,000,000 on the tenth, and then ends at 215 results on the 22nd page. Nearly all results are linked to the Language Log.

Given this, I'd conclude that almost no one seems to actually write "will have had gone", and though it is grammatical to me, the construction is easily superseded by "have", "would have", and other such constructions. The skewed result is likely due to Google's algorithms making a prediction based on the frequency of the individual words alone.

[Bob Johnson]

I can confirm one hit on google books, plus a few false positives of the form "will have/had gone". It makes more sense in context than alone on the thread title.

[Arzena]

Doesn't sound weird to me.

[ol bofosh]

Does sound normal to me, and yet I'm not quite sure. I'm not sure if I would use it.

"By the time I arrive you will have had gone."
"By the time I arrive you would have gone."
"By the time I arrive you will have gone."

?

I'd be more likely to use the third there.

What's the grammatical view of "will have had...", in terms of terminology, not whether it's correct or not? Are both "have" and "had" perfect aspect here?

[cromulant]

Flagrantly ungrammatical IMD. All the examples in Nort's link are ungrammatical, the "had" needs to go in every single one.

The future perfect is rare enough, so the "future pluperfect" is even more so.

Well...I don't know what that would even mean. Assuming this is a valid construction in some dialects, how does it differ from the future perfect? How would removing the "had" change the placement in time of the verb?

[clawgrip]

The Language Log says:

I suspect that people who are happy with "will have had gone" have the reduced form of have (often written "of") in that construction. But there are several obvious questions about the grammar of the rest of the string, which I leave open for discussion in the comments.

For example: if will_of, would_of etc. are finite forms, how come they're followed by had? This might be like "might could", but examples like this are rare:

My guess is that if indeed these speakers have reanalyzed will have as a single modal will_of (henceforth referred to as will_have) that is lacking in its perfective aspect, the situation becomes fairly easy to explain.

There are two posited changes in this Variant English:
1. that past participles may occur consecutively, as evidenced in the original phrase will have had gone
2. as mentioned, will have has been reanalyzed as a single modal will_have, which is a lexical variant of will and no longer indicative of perfective aspect

As for change #1:
The premise of this analysis rests on the assumption that the sample phrase will have had gone represents a variation in colloquial speech, rather than a simple error. In Standard English the word had in will have had is a past participle, and as there is no evidence whatever to suggest that had has been reanalyzed as simple past in the Variant English (which would require an additional violation of Standard English rules), we will therefore accept the explanation that violates the fewest rules and maintain that it remains a past participle.

As for change #2:
The premise of this analysis rests on the assumption that will_have is now a variant of will as stated above. If we assume that will and will_have coexist in the Variant English, and that they serve different functions, however slight such a difference may be, the question thus necessarily falls to what differentiates will from will_have, i.e. which situations call for one and which call for the other.

As we all know, in Standard English, modals such as will cannot be followed by anything other than the bare infinitive, e.g. will go, will have gone, and the auxiliary have requires a past participle, e.g. have done, will have gone. There is no evidence whatever to suggest that the Variant English's single modal will_have has lost the requirement, despite being lexically identical to will.

Therefore, because,

A. perfective aspect requires the use of have as an auxiliary,
B. have can no longer follow will without forming will_have and losing its marking for perfective aspect,

and as mentioned,

C. will_have must be followed by a past participle,
B. past participles can follow other past participles,

Then if we assume that the Variant English has successfully found a strategy to indicate future perfect that works under these restrictions, we can conclude that the only recourse is to employ will_have before perfect forms (which employ have as per rule A) in order to protect have from assimilation into will as per rule B, necessarily changing it into had as per rule C. The result is will have had gone.

[Chargone]

will_of and would_of are non-things.
it's 'will_have' and 'would_have', which are reduced when prounced to "will'v" and "would'v" ... and most people pronounce 'of' as 'v' most of the time. hence the confusion.

grammatically that's a 'have' right there.

and the 'had' there is usually either 'had to', used as 'needed to' or 'had' as in 'previously possessed'.

which is probably not really on topic and/or dealt with in the thing you're quoting, but those 'would of' 'could of' 'should of' things drive me nuts...

edit: and you immediately deal with it anyway, never mind. (seriously, pet hates are distracting. i need less of them)

[Vuvuzela]

It's an aspect... within an aspect... within a sort-of-tense-sort-of-aspect-grammatical-category. Aspect and or tense ception!

[Radius Solis]

Completely ungrammatical to me, but I thought that the notion of a future pluperfect made at least some kind of possible sense. And I just wrote a whole post diagramming it with time arrows.

But the diagram disproved my own idea - the future pluperfect tis not temporally distinct from the future perfect, unless it's possible to have two temporal deictic centers for the same clause. The deictic center(DC) is the time under discussion; the normal pluperfect serves to indicate an event that happened before the DC when the DC is in the past, while the perfect does the same thing for a DC in the present. When the DC is in the future, the future perfect does this. But a "future pluperfect" would mean moving the DC first to the future and then back from it, and that has no rational interpretation I can find.

[Bob Johnson]

am I required to doublepost to point out the thread necromancy

[Chargone]

am I required to doublepost to point out the thread necromancy

dunno what's up the double posts, but on the necroing all i can say is 'oops?'

thread wasn't far down the list of pages and i didn't notice the date on it.

[Radius Solis]

Not sure what's going on with the double posts, but as for necroing a six week gap in a serious linguistics topic, restarted by a thoughtful post, is surely no great sin.

[Jashan]

It works for me:

"will have gone" = action which takes place in the future, but before another action which also takes place in the future.

Here's an example using "finished" instead of "gone", but same principle

By the time we arrive at the concert [in the future], the band will have finished playing already.

"will have had gone" = an action which takes in the future, but before another action which also takes place in the future before another action in the future as well

John will arrive at the concert at midnight. By then, we will have gone home already, because the band will have had finished playing.

[clawgrip]

It's just future perfect with a redundant auxiliary. Normally a participle can't follow another participle, but because will have had and had gone are both acceptable forms, the sound of them combined gives a false sense of familiarity to this blatantly ungrammatical (according to commonly accepted English grammar) construction, and that's probably what allowed it to slip into (someone's) common use.

[Chargone]

So... basically, the 'had' is redundant and doesn't actually contribute anything?

Because so far that's what i'm getting.

[clawgrip]

Yes.