Future perfect and the ‘will’ you probably won’t have taught

Recently, I was doing some corpus digging to see how the future perfect tense (will have done) is actually used. It’s one of those tenses that tends to make people roll their eyes and question whether it’s worth teaching. And I have to admit, when you see a whole load of examples together on the page of an ELT coursebook, it does start to look awkward and contrived. That’s why I turned to the corpus, to see if I could find some more natural-sounding contexts for it.

I constructed a CQL search as below to look for examples. I knew it wouldn’t capture absolutely everything (it doesn’t include negatives with won’t or passives – will have been done - and it only allows for one adverb in one position – e.g. will probably have done), but it was enough to get me started.

 

Then I disappeared down a grammatical rabbit hole! My main finding? Only roughly 40% of the corpus cites for this structure refer to future time and can really be described as future perfect tenses. So, what were the rest? 

 

Showing my workings:

Before I get into the details, a note about my “methodology”. This was a very quick, rough and ready bit of research, so you shouldn’t pin too much significance on the exact stats. I do, though, think it says something about the general pattern of usage. I looked at three different corpora – the English Trends web corpus (2014-now), the enTenTen21 corpus and for a comparison with spoken language, the BNC2104 spoken corpus (all via SketchEngine). For each one, I performed the same CQL search, then selected a random sample of 100 lines. I went through those lines manually noting down how many lines referred clearly to future time and could be described as the future perfect tense, then everything else was relegated to the “other” category. I did it as a fairly quick scan and I didn’t spend ages agonizing over each line. There were inevitably tricky cases, and I may not have been entirely consistent about how I categorized them. The spoken data was especially tricky, as it always is, because it’s messy and contains lots of repetitions, false starts and fragments of language. This is quite a purposeful construction though (you have to stop and think to put it together), so most of the cites were fairly clear.  There were also a handful  of odd cases in each set where the past participle was actually being used as an adjective with have as the main verb (The supermarket will have frozen fruit, won’t they?), these got lumped in with the “not future”

How DO we use the future perfect?

Looking at the cites which did express a future perfect, they were actually a lot like the kind of examples you find in ELT books. 

 

There were the predictions about the future, especially around climate change (...warn that by as early as 2025 the ice will have melted), or on a more mundane level, weather forecasts (On Thursday that area of rain will have moved away).

There were planning and logistics contexts describing events on a timeline (At 7:30pm, the polls will have closed in Ohio), again, some of them fairly informal and everyday (we're going away the May half term week hopefully - oh okay they'll have finished their exams).

And there were quite a lot of stats and trends of various kinds (... insisting spending will have fallen by £100m over the life of this parliament; The figure will have climbed to 120 by the time the Newcastle outlet opens.)

One interesting usage is in adverts, especially for training courses, touting what you’ll have achieved by the end of the course (By the end of the workshop, you will have developed a draft of a capability statement for your business! When the day is over, you will have experienced Chattanooga in a way that few people have).

I think the main reason that future perfect examples in ELT materials tend to come across as contrived is simply because we don’t typically use lots of instances together. It’s a tense that crops up now and again, so it’s not the individual examples that are inauthentic, it’s just seeing so many of them crowbarred together, especially when someone tries to combine them in a single text … which is hard to avoid when the structure’s the focus of a lesson or activity.

Hypothetical futures

There were a chunk of examples in conditionals or other types of hypothetical contexts, which I don’t want to get into too much here. Some of these were based in reality and fairly easy to pin down as being about future time (If you leave it till tomorrow, they’ll have sold out), others were a bit more abstract and my brain started to melt a bit when I tried to figure out the timelines (if I were sat in the back seat I mean what am I going to do if I think you're driving dangerously? It'll be too late you'll have crashed).

Will as a modal expressing certainty + present perfect

As I said at the start, around 60% of the cites in the written corpora, far more in the spoken data, weren’t referring to future time at all and couldn’t (and shouldn’t!) be classified as future perfect. Taking into account the messy odds and sods, let’s say around half were actually examples of will being used as a modal verb to express certainty, strong likelihood or expectation*, along with a present perfect tense used in the regular kind of present perfect way to express recent past or events at some point in the past with a result in the present. It’s particularly common to make assumptions about what your audience is likely to know already; you’ll have heard/seen/read. But it crops up in a range of contexts, including to express expectations in job adverts (You will have worked at a senior level on at least one national publication; applicants ideally will have completed coursework in technology, software development, transportation or other related areas.)

And of course, will can be used in this way with a range of tenses. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s the entry about this usage from the Collins COBUILD English Grammar:

 

 

(Click to enlarge)

 

It’s something I feel I may have seen mentioned in ELT materials here and there, but it’s certainly not a use I’ve seen really highlighted or taught with a variety of verb tenses.  Perhaps one to be added to syllabuses, especially at upper levels?

 

* Of course, there’s an argument that will is always a modal expressing certainty/likelihood. You can replace it with other modals to express different degrees of certainty – By 2030 emissions will/might/may/are highly likely to have exceeded … But at least in the future perfect as described above, it is also expressing future time.

Lexicography FAQs: messy entries

Last week, I was speaking at the BAAL Vocab SIG conference about the process of compiling an entry for a learner's dictionary. I talked about some of the questions that you end up asking as you carry out your corpus research, and the variety of challenges and choices you're faced with: from how many variant forms of a word to show, to what constitutes a separate part of speech, to how finely to split out different senses of a word, and what uses and patterns to exemplify.

I mentioned how entries can range in length from very simple, single-sense words to the mammoth entry for run, the longest entry in most contemporary learner's dictionaries, running to 120 numbered senses in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (see what I did there?! ).

This week, I've been thinking about how some entries are really simple and straighforward to compile, while others turn out to be messy and entangled. A couple of medical-related entries I've dealt with recently exemplify that nicely. The entry for cynaosis, despite being a fairly specialized medical term, turned out to be a really simple one to compile. It only has a single, clearly-defined meaning and it's one that can be explained easily within a defining vocabulary.

CCU, on the other hand, turned out to be a complicated mess. Abbreviations can be tricky for a number of reasons. Firstly, they're hard to search for in the corpus because the same abbreviation often gets used to refer to lots of different things, some of them things you wouldn't put in the dictionary, like names of companies or products or local sports clubs, etc., but also sometimes more than one generally-used concept that's relatively high frequency and that learner's might reasonably look up. Then there's the question of whether to have full entries for both the abbreviation and full form or maybe just a cross-reference at the abbreviation pointing to the full form. In the days of print dictionaries when space was at a premium, x-refs would be widely used, but online, it seems unnecessary to send a user round in circles when you could just give a full definition at both. Different publishers and projects will have detailed policies for these kinds of things set out in the styleguide, but sometimes decisions are still left, in part, to the discretion of the lexicographer, considering things such as overall frequency of the term and the relative frequencies of the abbreviation and full form. CCU, as you can see below, led me down a whole rabbit hole of different questions and choices both about the abbreviation itself and other possible variants and inclusions!

 

So, it seems that CCU can be an abbreviation for coronary care unit or cardiac care unit, which are both the same thing. However, such units are also sometimes called just coronary units or cardiac units - in which case, the abbreviation wouldn't be CCU. CCU can also refer to a critical care unit, which is something different, but mostly synonymous with intensive care unit, for which the abbreviation is ICU ... are you still following?!

 

And as I mentioned in my session last week, all those decisions about what to show, where and how have to be filtered through the lens of what will be most helpful for the user. You're always balancing wanting a learner to find the meaning or form of the word (or abbreviation) they've come across, which leans towards "include everthing", but at the same time, you know that they also want simple, concise answers rather than a confusing mess of too much information. Because, TL;DR!

Phrasal verbs: delivering on a trend

A couple of years ago, I worked on two phrasal verb projects for Collins, a new edition of the Collins COBUILD Phrasal Verbs Dictionary and Work on your Phrasal Verbs (2e), with my friend and frequent collaborator, Penny Hands. We ended up having quite a few discussions about the increasing trend for phrasal verbs and the reasons behind it. Penny wrote a post about it on the Collins ELT blog in which she discusses not just the completely new phrasal verbs that have come into use, but also the trend to add particles after verbs more often.

Since then, it’s something I can’t help noticing, both in everyday life and when I’m researching language for other projects. Last week, I was looking at the verb deliver and came across another phrasal verb trend that seems to have built over the past few years, deliver on sth.

 

[click to enlarge]

It isn’t a completely new combination, of course. Looking back at the old BNC compiled in the mid-1990s, I can find examples of the classic collocation, deliver on a promise, plus just 2 or 3 similar objects:

 

Looking at more recent corpus data though, it’s clear that classic collocation has expanded to include a much greater range of objects in recent years:

 

And it’s been extended from people delivering on promises, to things, especially products, delivering on what you’d hoped for:

 

Gruesome plurals

When you work on ELT materials, you can end up researching all kinds of random topics and in lexicography, that mix can be even more unpredictable. Over recent months, I’ve been working on a lot of medical terminology; researching terms with the help of input from a specialist medical editor, then checking corpus evidence, finding usable examples, and putting together dictionary entries. It’s been fascinating learning the names for all kinds of body parts and working out how things fit together. Google image searches have been particularly useful for visualizing exactly where your unciform bone or suprachiasmatic nucleus are!

One thing that’s very noticeable is the amount of terminology that originates from Latin and Greek and has irregular plural forms that have to be checked and included. I’ve learnt that the plural of stroma is stromata, that more than one fimbria can be described as fimbriae, and that you have one tragus on each ear giving you a pair of tragi … amongst many many others.

However, there are many anatomical features which you only have one of, so while they’re technically countable nouns, they’re overwhelmingly used in the singular. And actually, many things which we have pairs of are predominantly referred to singularly too; The tragus is a small piece of cartilage on the inner side of the external ear.  So, when checking for plural forms, I often have to do quite a bit of searching.

I’ve gradually come to realize though that plural body parts only tend to crop up in medical research. Sometimes it’s a study involving several patients, which is okay. More often than not though, the plurals appear in rather gruesome animal experiments – in contexts that really ought to have trigger warnings for the unsuspecting! Thankfully, I’m mostly just checking that the irregular plural is used (and hasn’t been anglicized to stromas or traguses, sometimes the case for very common terms) and I don’t have to include any gruesome examples.