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AH! Ok, I think I distilled it down to something simpler: It seems to be similar to the difference between "I would've been spoken to" vs. "I would've been bein

AH! Ok, I think I distilled it down to something simpler: It seems to be similar to the difference between "I would've been spoken to" vs. "I would've been being spoken to". Is that correct? Ugh, I have to admit it seems technically "correct" after all :-) but with such a painful (and uncommon) sentence structure that it makes you question if it's right...

reshlo 5y ago
The former is past perfect[1], and the latter is past perfect progressive.[2] There are subtleties involved, but the most basic use case is that the former refers to an action that took place before some point in the past (to which the sentence refers), while the latter refers to an action that was still happening at that past point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Past_perfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Past_perfect_progressive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...