CSG130

119

Compound Tenses: The Futurę Perfect and the Conditional Perfect

people? Cyberspace might have created infinite possibilities of communication at great speed, but it has not foreseen the great number of ridiculous and suspicious messages we receive every day. This message says that if I mail this letter to ten people, in three days I will have received a pleasant surprise. And these people will have returned the same messages ten morę times! But if I do not send the message, in one week I will have seen an unfavorable change in my life. What will I find out three days from today? I will drive carefully . . . just in case.

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cyberspace

dishonest

illness

joke

just in case miraculous proposition

el anuncio

el espacio cibernetico deshonesto(a)

la enfermedad, el padecimiento

el cliiste

por si acaso

milagroso(a)

la proposición

speed

stranger

suspicious

to foresee

to forward

unfavorable

user

la velocidad

el/la desconocido(a)

sospechoso(a)

prever

reenviar

desfavorable

el/la usuario(a)

The Conditional Perfect

Consider an action or event that would have happened but did not, because some conditions, specified by the speaker or not, were not met, or other events prevented the action from taking place. In other words, the eventor actions expressed with the conditional perfect did not really happen. This is the message in an English utterance such as “They would have come.” What pre-vented the subject they from completing the action? When explained, if or but is usually in-cluded in the statement (“. . . if they’d been free”).

The conditional perfect (el condicional perfecto) in Spanish is a compound tense. The forms of the conditional (el condicional simple) of haber are used as the auxiliary verb for the conditional perfect. The past participle of the verb being conjugated is added to the auxiliary to cre-ate the compound tense.

Notę: Remember that the verb haber is also commonly used in the impersonal forms hay (there is, there are), habria (there was, there were), etc.

Here are examples of the three conjugations pagar, vender, and salir in the conditional perfect:

habria pagado, vendido, salido	habriamos pagado, vendido, salido
habrias pagado, vendido, salido	habriais pagado, vendido, salido
habria pagado, vendido, salido	habrian pagado, vendido, salido

Remember that:

•    all conditional forms of haber, the auxiliary verb, have an accent mark on the i.

•    the elements of a compound tense cannot be separated.

Rosa habria comprado un diamante.    Rosa would have hought a diamond.

jYo te habria ayudado!    I would have helped you!