Thursday, October 28, 2010

When combining Present Perfect tense and Future tense, don’t omit any verbs


When combining the Present Perfect tense and the Future tense in one sentence, don’t omit any verbs. That is to say, include all auxiliary verbs and all main verbs.

Omitting the first main verb is a common mistake. Here are two examples.

Example from Bleacher Report:

“Through significant pain, [Andrew] Bynum [pictured] gave everything he had and opted out of surgery, possibly putting his NBA career in jeopardy just to help his team win.... This won him major kudos with teammates, most notably Kobe Bryant, and head coach Phil Jackson. This has and will further contribute to the respect Bynum gets from his teammates and coaching staff alike.” (Boldface added.)

Correction:

has contributed and will further contribute

Example from The Market Ticker:

“We are not far away from a complete and total breakdown of lawful behavior among the population of this nation…. This has and will in the future occur because the government has refused to enforce long-standing laws…” (Boldface added.)

A literal correction would be:

has occurred and will in the future occur

A smoother correction would be:

has occurred and will continue to occur

The author did not notice that the meaning of this sentence is logically inconsistent with the phrase “total breakdown,” which occurs in an earlier sentence. For, when a total breakdown has occurred, nothing more can break down.

For additional information on the combining of tenses, see these two posts on the Sequence of Tenses: (1, 2).

The Takeaway: When combining the Present Perfect tense and the Future tense in one sentence, don’t omit any verbs. When you omit verbs, you run two risks: (1) that you will confuse some readers; (2) that you will appear to be careless.

See disclaimer.

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