Future Perfect Progressive Tense in English Grammar
Learn the rules for conjugating the English future perfect progressive tense and get tips on its usage. In the exercises, you can practise your English grammar skills.
They recently changed the road signs here and now there has been an accident. The driver won’t have been paying attention. The traffic is backed up for miles. The other cars will have been waiting for hours for the accident to be cleared.
Now it seems that you are not paying attention anymore, you’ve gone right through the stop sign! In ten minutes, you will have been driving non-stop for six hours. We ought to stop for a break.
We can use the English future perfect progressive tense to:
- emphasise the length of an action in progress at a certain time in the future, usually with reference to the duration of the action
- In ten minutes you will have been driving non-stop for six hours.
- express what we imagine or think is happening at a certain future or present time
- The cars will have been waiting for hours for the accident to be cleared.
- express an assumption about what was happening at a certain time in the past.
- There was an accident last week. The driver won’t have been paying attention to the road signs.
When using the future perfect progressive in English, we usually include a reference to a specific time such as next year, by this time, last week.
- By this time tomorrow, you will have been driving for 24 hours!
Conjugation of English Future Perfect Progressive Tense
To conjugate the English future perfect progressive tense, we follow the rule: will + have + been + present participle or -ing form of the main verb. The table below provides an overview of conjugations in the the positive, negative and interrogative form. The conjugation is the same for all forms.
|all forms are the same||I will have been speaking||I will not have been speaking||Will I have been speaking?|
Present Participle – Spelling Rules
The present participle is generally formed by adding -ing to the base of a verb. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule:
- An -e at the end of the word is removed, but -ee, -oe and -ye remain unchanged.
- come – coming
- but: agree - agreeing
- The final consonant is doubled in words that have a short stressed vowel before the final consonant. However, -w, -x and -y are not doubled.
- sit – sitting
- but: mix – mixing
- An -l as a final consonant after a vowel is always doubled in British English but not in American English.
- travel – travelling (British)
- traveling (American)
- An -ie at the end of the word is replaced with a -y
- lie – lying
Contractions are a combination of certain pronouns, verbs and the word not. They are mostly used in spoken and informal written English. The table below provides an overview of contractions of will in the English future perfect progressive tense.
|will not||…’ll not/… won’t||I’ll not/I won’t|
- He’ll not have been driving for six hours.
- (but not:
Her husband’ll/Marc’ll not’ve been driving for six hours.)
Negated contractions, formed with an auxiliary verb and not, can be used after nouns as well as pronouns.