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Contraposition Posted 11 years ago
Vocabulary

crack



Could I ask native teachers some questions?

1. 'would have expected to have found her by now'
What does 'would have' and the next perfect tense mean grammatically?

2. What does 'crack' mean in this context?
  

Top answer

1. "to have found her" refers to an event that was expected to have happened in the past. While it is obviously an infinitive, fundamentally the reason for the perfect tense is the same as in "we have found her".

— GPY

  • 1.
  • "to have found her" refers to an event that was expected to have happened in the past.
  • While it is obviously an infinitive, fundamentally the reason for the perfect tense is the same as in "we have found her".
  • Although "would have expected" feels natural, the actual explanation for it seems pretty murky to me.
  • It seems to me that "would" is more expressing the hypothetical nature of "to have found her" than anything to do with "expected"; in other words, it has been displaced from something like "we expected that we would have found her".
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3 Answers
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1. "to have found her" refers to an event that was expected to have happened in the past. While it is obviously an infinitive, fundamentally the reason for the perfect tense is the same as in "we have found her".

Although "would have expected" feels natural, the actual explanation for it seems pretty murky to me. It seems to me that "would" is more expressing the hypothetical nature of "
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Thank you for your detailed answer.

Then, is "would have expected" not a conditional?
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contrapositionThank you for your detailed answer.Then, is "would have expected" not a conditional?
What do you think it might be conditional on?
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