Sometimes this tense seems to me very confusing, could you please help me out ?
For example She said she had been writing a letter
Is the action in the sentence above not over at the moment of speaking ? Or she had already finished writing the letter when she said that, and she was writing it before saying ?
In other words, does the Past perfect continious describe actions which are already over at a particular time in the past or not ?
I presume you will say that the PPC can describe both types of actions and my question then is: How do I distinguish them ?
Sorry for my bad english if you do not understand my question I’ll have another try to explain what I mean.
Sometimes this tense seems to me very confusing, could you please help me out ?
For example
She said she had been writing a letter
Is the action in the sentence above not over at the moment of speaking ? Or she had already finished writing the letter when she said that, and she was writing it before saying ?
Without the original context, we have no way of knowing whether the letter was finished or not.
You: What have you been doing this morning?
She: I’ve been writing a letter to John.
You: Ah, dod you want me to post it?
She: Oh thanks, but I’ve not finished it. Maybe you’d be kind enough to post it later?
You: What have you been doing this morning?
She: I’ve been writing a letter to John/I’ve written a letter to John/I wrote a letter to John.
You: Ah, do you want me to post it?
She: Oh yes, thanks. Here it is.
Thanks, Molly
Perhaps you didn’t notice that I was talking about the past perfect continious
A couple of examples:
She said she had been writing a letter for 3 hours already - the word “already” here indicates that the action was still in progress at the moment of saying
She said she had been writing a letter for 3 hours - the same duration adjunct, but, as I assume, she wasn’t writing a letter at the moment of saying
Today I woke up very late and decided to call on my sister. When she picked up the phone her voice sounded quite tired. I asked her what’s the matter and she said that she had been writing a very important letter for 3 hours.
So I dont understand:
She was writing this letter and the call interrupted the action or she was writing the letter,for example, five hours before ?
If she was writing the letter when you called, I imagine the call interrupted the action of writing, but we still don’t know whether the letter was finished just prior to you calling her.
Simply, "I’ve been/She’d been writing a letter for (the past) three hours only tells us what she was doing (i.e. writing) up to the moment of the call, it doesn’t tell us whether the letter was finished or not.
Tell me what you think of this:
“When I met Jack in the park, he was wearing trainers/sneakers and sweating all over. I asked him what he’d been doing and he said he’d been running.”
Did he continue running after the conversation, FiveStar?
We don’t know, and maybe the speaker who saw the guy in the park also doesn’t know. All we know is that the speaker is telling us about what happened prior to, leading up to, the “meeting”.
It all depends on the context and on the action (verb) being talked about. Here, for example, we can be pretty sure that the action was completed at the time of speech:
When I arrived, Maggie (barked that she) had been waiting for two hours.
See what I mean?
Much ambiguity is disambiguated in context. That’s the problem with a lot of English forums and English lessons, they present decontextualised sentences and expect us to interpret and make judgements about such sentences.
The problem here, as Molly has pointed out, is that we shift the tense backwards when we report what was said.
She said “I have been writing this letter for 3 hours” – this becomes “She said that she had been…” so yes, it’s ambiguous if you only get to hear the reported speech.
If you actually hear her say “I have been writing this letter” then you know the action is still taking place.
If you actually hear her say “I had been writig this letter” then you know the action is complete.
We use the Past Perfect Continuous for two purposes.
To show that something started in the past and continued up until another time in the past. Typically, there’s some sort of duration phrase indicated, such as ‘for the past hour’, ‘for the last week’, ‘for five minutes’, etc. This is sort of related to the Present Perfect Continuous; however, the duration does not continue until now, it stops before something else in the past.
If there’s not a duration phrase, then often people will use the Past Continuous rather than the Past Perfect Continuous, but this changes the meaning. Past Continuous emphasizes interrupted actions, whereas Past Perfect Continuous emphasizes a duration of time before something in the past.
Cause and effect.
‘Her hand was cramped because she had been writing for two hours’. Because she had been writing for so long, her hand was cramped. Cause and effect.
So, in answer to your question, without a duration phrase in there, it isn’t possible to tell whether or not the action was finished. It is ambiguous, and either needs more context for clarification, or re-wording.
In summary:
Past Perf. Cont. for finished action in the past over a duration of time.
Present Perf. Cont. for duration in the past until now, or without a duration phrase a sense of ‘lately’
So did he ?