Using “will have” with the past participle with the last participle has the last participle, “will have” with the past participle, “will have” with the last participle, “duplicate”
What are Tenses in English? How do
- they relate to one another? I came
across the following example from the textbook Advanced Grammar in Use by Martin Hewings.
To say that we think a past situation actually happened, we use will have + past participle.
As it was cloudy, few people will have seen last night’s lunar eclipse.
Why isn’t the past simple or past perfect used in the aforementioned example?
A solar eclipse would sweep across the entire moon after a few minutes because it was cloudy. This morning there were no spectres of the moon.
How can we improve our product?
It is a relatively normal night in the sky but it can be cloudy (not very rainy) today. I don’t know how many people did the moon eclipse between the two sides.
I saw half of the Moon in the horizon tonight because it was cloudy, but most of the people don’t get any views. Still a few people have seen sun from the horizon.
In what way is the speaker of the second sentence changing the statement, by using a future perfect?
Is speaker making a kind of prediction? Time will show that very few people saw it. As we get closer, some people will very possibly say they didn’t see it. The future perfect there is a very mild form of “Mark my words”. We have no reason to believe otherwise. I don’t believe that we will see a lunar eclipse until Sunday,
because of the cloudy weather in the atmosphere, so I expect maybe 100 to 120 million people will see it…
What are your views..? If so, why are they important?
