Korean Job Discussion Forums

[blackjack]

I teach an adult class once a week, relatively high level. We normally use a newspaper article, go through, discuss it and do group or pair activities. There is one guy however that is grammar mad. He picked this sentence out of the article and was asking why it uses "won't" instead of "wouldn't" have.

This rat was incredibly tame," he told the Guardian newspaper. "it just sat next to me nibbling on a piece of leaf. It won't have seen a human before"

It's future perfect right? But why would they use future when it has seen a human now.

I simply told him that as it's a quote it is simply an unusual form of spoken English, but I wasn't sure so I will check it out for him.

Cheers

[Moldy Rutabaga]

I would have written, "It had never seen a human before." Unless this is dialect of British usage, it does not make sense to me. You could use future perfect to describe a completed action that hasn't happened yet, but as the speaker has said the rat was sitting next to him, it has seen a human before. Thus the sentence is grammatically correct, but semantically incorrect.

Unless someone else here has an answer, I would tell the student that the article is a typo or that the paper is reproducing the speaker's error verbatim.

Ken:>

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

I think it's just a modal verb (I could probably do with going through all my old CELTA notes and finding my grammar table though)

[lifeinkorea]

Future Perfect.

In 5 years I WILL HAVE lived in korea for 7 years. I won't have lived in any other countries.

If we replace with "would", then that means that the event is less likely to occur. If we are talking about the future, we don't use "have". That is more a past tense thing with "would".

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

But doesn't it just mean it hasn't or couldn't possibly have seen a human before which is why it so so tame? ie has nothing in it's experience to tell it it could be in danger?

In which case it seems interchangeable with "mustn't"

[edwardcatflap]

Yes Will is being employed as a modal verb here to express probablity in the past in the same way as you might say 'it's 8 o'clock, he will have arrived by now.' It's not interchangeable with 'must', however, as must is not used in the negative sense, 'can't is used instead, e.g. 'I can't have drunk all those bottles of beer ast night it's not possible.

[blackjack]

[edwardcatflap]

it's not future perfect, it's a modal verb referring to the past