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Consider these two examples,

  1. I will have had eaten by that time.
  2. I will have had been working there for five years.

To me, the first sentence seems to express the proposition that, it is the present (t1); I will begin eating in a future moment (t2); finish eating by sometime after that (t3); and that eating will be relevant to the time referenced in the sentence, "that time" (t4).

Whereas, to me the second sentence seems to express the proposition that, it is t1; I will begin working somewhere at t2; I will continue working there until t3, at which time I will stop working there; and my time working there will be relevant to a later time that the speaker is discussing, t4.

Are these configurations grammatical? Do they have names?

Hal
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    They are not accepted constructions. Drop the hads and they're ordinary future perfects. – StoneyB on hiatus Feb 21 '14 at 15:38
  • That said, if you said either sentence to a native speaker, they'll almost certainly understand your meaning. – Doc Feb 21 '14 at 15:45
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    I'll go ahead and coin "future pluperfect" for these – pavja2 Feb 21 '14 at 15:46
  • To me, "will have had" expresses that the action stopped before the time in question; whereas, "will have" does not express anything about the time the action stopped - just that it has stopped. – Hal Feb 21 '14 at 15:47
  • @Hal: "will have eaten" already implies that you are finished eating. – WinnieNicklaus Feb 21 '14 at 15:51
  • @pavja2 that term you coined returns some discussion on the topic. Evidently, it's a thing. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/455868?uid=3737720&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103432459661 – Hal Feb 21 '14 at 15:53
  • That paper is frankly inexplicable :) I updated my answer to acknowledge it. – WinnieNicklaus Feb 21 '14 at 15:59
  • @WinnieNicklaus No argument there. I don't believe these are grammatical. I'm just describing the differences I, personally, detect: "will have had" seems to express, [[sometime before, but excluding, the moment in question]]; whereas, "will have" seems to express, [[sometime during or before the moment in question]]. – Hal Feb 21 '14 at 16:03
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    After mulling it over I think that there are situations where this works. For example: "If we keep coming to Taco Bell this often I will have had eaten 300 Crunchwrap Supremes by the time I graduate." – pavja2 Feb 21 '14 at 17:25
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    @pavja2 Ha. That's a good example. Perhaps, "Presently (t1) I expect (t1) that when I graduate (t3), I will have (t3) had eaten (t2) 300 Crunchwrap Supremes by sometime well before then (t2). (t1, t2, etc denote times, numbered from earliest to latest). – Hal Feb 21 '14 at 18:52
  • @pavja2: OP's examples aren't any kind of "nameable" tense usages - they're just ungrammatical gibberish attempts to express the standard usage as raised in the earlier ELU question Future perfect progressive – FumbleFingers Feb 22 '14 at 14:27

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These configurations are not grammatical. It is interesting how in English, one can string together auxiliary verbs, but it's not without limits.

You have a few choices to make:

  • Is it past, present, or future? In the case of future, you will have the auxiliary verb will.
  • Is it perfect? If so, you will have the auxiliary verb have, placed in the proper tense.
  • Is it progressive? If so, you will have the auxiliary verb be, and your verb will end in -ing.

So you can create monstrosities like "I will have been eating for two hours". But you have pushed it too far. You have used the perfect marker have twice, and not only that, but you have conjugated them in different tenses (once in the future, once in the past). This doesn't make any sense.

Note that it is possible to have two occurrences of have, but they are not both auxiliary verbs in this case. In "I have had three bouts of flu", have is the auxiliary, making the sentence present perfect, and had is the main verb, in its participle form.

For fun, and to drive yourself crazy, see James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher. :)

Edit: You have dug up a paper that actually supports the presence of double have in some dialects. Not having access to the paper, I can only conjecture that I and most people like me (native US speaker) would find this construction to be strange, with only guesses as to what it could mean.

WinnieNicklaus
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  • There's also passive BE + PaPpl. – StoneyB on hiatus Feb 21 '14 at 15:42
  • Good catch. In that case, for purposes of tense, you can just think of it as the main verb. – WinnieNicklaus Feb 21 '14 at 15:48
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    Except you could have I will have been being eaten for two hours (perhaps by mosquitoes?). – StoneyB on hiatus Feb 21 '14 at 15:56
  • In which case you have future perfect progressive, the -ing attaching to the main verb in the sentence, be. – WinnieNicklaus Feb 21 '14 at 15:58
  • I should clarify that when I said think of "it" as the main verb, "it" was referring to passive be. – WinnieNicklaus Feb 21 '14 at 15:59
  • @WinnieNicklaus, This might have been grammatical now... See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3824 and google.com/... – Pacerier May 27 '16 at 12:44
  • Whether or not something can be considered "grammatical" is completely relative. For instance, Shakespeare (arguably) butchered his sentences by mixing up the word order to improper extremes and made up new words. Yet, we still praise his work. Nathaniel Hawthorne casually used "!" marks in the middle of sentences such as, in The Scarlet Letter, "She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an hour's free breath! and here again was the scarlet misery glittering on the old spot!" This entire slew of words is intended to be one single sentence despite the "improper" interjection of "!"s. – Jack G Oct 11 '18 at 05:37