Since + past continuous

Question

Hi, dear teachers. Would you please tell me how do we use past continuous after "since" naturally?
I've already known some of its usage. Please see the following diagram:

Something(A) started at time X in the past. Then it stopped at time Y. Some condition(B) has prevailed between X or Y and now. B may have prevailed between X and now, or between Y and now, or something in between.

If I want to say the action B was being done between X and Y and B is still being done after Y up until now, I can use the pattern "since + past continuous". (in this case B3 is referred to)
For example,

1. "I have been eating roast duck since I was living in China", which suggests that I was eating it during my residence in China and I am still eating it now.

?I can also use the past continuous tense to describe what is then essentially in the nature of an interrupted action:?

1a. "I haven't heard any more noise since I was sleeping".?

2a. "I haven't heard from her since she was living in London".

A native speaker told me so as is written above. Now could you please tell me if there is any other use of the pattern "since + past continuous"?

Thank you very much.

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

zuotengdazuoA native speaker told me so as is written above.

Not all native speakers agree on what is natural English. Personally, I do not accept any sentences like these. I have used fraze.it to find patterns of this type using the verbs 'do', 'sleep', 'go', and 'live', and I have found none that express the meaning you are looking for — only those where 'since' means 'because'. I was not surprised by this discovery. (You can do this yourself on fraze.it with the command since do/t:pac. This finds sentences with "since" which also contain the past continuous tense of 'do'. You'll have to sort them out yourself with regard to which ones have the patterns you're looking for. And of course you can change the verb to whatever you want.)

I would "fix" those with 'live' thus: ... since the time I was living in ... OR ... since the days when I was living in .... I would "fix" the one with 'sleep' thus: ... since I woke up ..., assuming that's the idea you're trying to express.

CJ

Zuotengdazuo · Answer

CalifJim
zuotengdazuoA native speaker told me so as is written above.
Not all native speakers agree on what is natural English. Personally, I do not accept any sentences like these.

Thank you very much. Now I know this pattern in question is weird to your ears. But I still have some questions:

1. I am not quite sure what that native speaker means by "what is then essentially in the nature of an interrupted action", could you please elaborate on it?

2. How do you interpret this sentence and it's time frame? This is an example from the British Corpus:
It's only a few days since I was sitting in the seats you all occupy...

3. How do you interpret this sentence and its time frame? This sentence doesn't seem very logical to me but Mr. GPY told me I could say this.
"I haven't been stressed out since I was working in that factory".

It seems to suggest working relieves my stress.

CalifJim
zuotengdazuoA native speaker told me so as is written above.
I would "fix" the one with 'sleep' thus: ... since I woke up ..., assuming that's the idea you're trying to express.
CJ

"since I woke up" is not my intended meaning. My intended meaning is I have heard noise for a while after I

Zuotengdazuo · Answer

I heard noise for a while after I went to bed. But the noise didn't ruin my sleep because I was so sleep that I gradually fell asleep despite the noise. I didn't hear the noise for the rest period of the sleep.

CalifJim · Answer

zuotengdazuo
I heard noise for a while after I went to bed. But the noise didn't ruin my sleep because I was so sleepy that I gradually fell asleep despite the noise. I didn't hear the noise for the rest period of the sleep.

We don't typically use a 'since' construction for this, so it doesn't sound idiomatic to say I haven't heard any more noise since I was sleeping if the quoted scenario above is what you want to say. You need Once I fell asleep, I didn't hear the noise (anymore).

CJ

CalifJim · Answer

what that native speaker means by "what is then essentially in the nature of an interrupted action"

I have little or no idea what that is supposed to mean. Nevertheless, putting the 'since' construction aside, the past continuous is used to describe a background against which some foreground event occurs, possibly interrupting the background activity. For example,

I was peacefully watching TV when someone knocked on the door.
Lucy was working in her garden when the phone rang.

CJ

CalifJim · Answer

2. How do you interpret this sentence and ~~it's~~ its time frame? This is an example from the British Corpus:
It's only a few days since I was sitting in the seats you all occupy...

Note that this is a different grammatical pattern from those you have been most concerned with. This one puts a specific time period in the main clause and nothing more. The others put an action in the main clause: I haven't seen him since I had lunch with him (two weeks ago).

I interpret this as I was sitting in [one of those seats] only a few days ago.

CJ

CalifJim · Answer

3. How do you interpret this sentence and its time frame? This sentence doesn't seem very logical to me but Mr. GPY told me I could say this.
"I haven't been stressed out since I was working in that factory".

I find it baffling. It seems to be saying one of the following:

I haven't been stressed out since I began working in that factory.
I haven't been stressed out since I quit working in that factory.

From my point of view (that factory work is stressful), the second interpretation seems more likely, but if that is truly the intention of the writer of the original sentence, it seems to me that the plan was poorly executed.
______________

I'd say that 'since' has to be followed by a clause that establishes a point in time (not some vague period of time), and if it doesn't, the reader has to guess what time-point is intended. If that kind of guessing becomes too difficult, there's something wrong with the sentence.

The kinds of grammatical phenomena that establish the necessary time-point are verbs like started, began, finished, and stopped, and the use of the simple past tense of dynamic verbs, possibly along with an adverb of time that makes the time-point quite precise.

since I fell asleep; since they finished the project; since the work began, since we vacationed in Italy, since the committee voted against it, since the car stopped working, since Tom moved to Chile last November, ...

Note that since the war can be interpreted as since the war ended. It's not difficult to understand which time-point is intended. You may also occasionally see sentences like I have felt much healthier since I have been taking vitamins, and those typically put the time-point at the beginning, so that sentence is equivalent to I have felt much healthier since I started taking vitamins. But since I was sleeping, since I was travelling to Japan, and since I was working at that office are much more vague about the point in time from which we are to measure and they make hard work for the reader trying to extract the meaning.

CJ

Zuotengdazuo · Answer

CalifJim
Note that since the war can be interpreted as since the war ended. It's not difficult to understand which time-point is intended. You may also occasionally see sentences like I have felt much healthier since I have been taking vitamins, and those typically put the time-point at the beginning, so that sentence is equivalent to I have felt much healthier since I started taking vitamins. But since I was sleeping, since I was travelling to Japan, and since I was working at that office are much more vague about the point in time from which we are to measure and they make hard work for the reader trying to extract the meaning.
CJ

Thank you so much, Mr. CJ.

Then would you please have a look at this thread?

https://www.EnglishForward.com/English/SincePastPerfect/bldvdq/post.htm

In this thread, I have some questions about reported speech and back-shifting of tense in novels.

1. I am not sure if all the narrative part in a novel is reported speech.
2. I am not sure if we really need to backshift tenses of all the predicates to their corresponding past tenses in a novel(written in past tense). For example, present perfect to past perfect

3. I don't know if the tenses of my example sentences in that thread are back-shifted.

4. If they are, then why the tense of since-clause of sentence 5) and 6) are not back-shifted.

5. I don't know why sometimes the author prefers simple past in since-clause(temporal "since") over past perfect(like example 5) and 6)). According to Ms. AS, "since + past perfect" is more common

Since + past continuous

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