Giáo trình động từ tiếng Pháp - Part IV Looking Ahead: The Future and the Conditional Tenses -

Chapter 16

Completing a Future Action

with the Future Perfect

In This Chapter

Creating the future perfect tense

Knowing the expressions that require the use of the future perfect

In today’s world, when everything has to be done yesterday, do you ever say to yourself

“I will have this or that done by a certain time,” such as before you leave the office or by

Friday? If so, you use the future perfect tense.

The future perfect tense is a compound tense requiring an auxiliary and a past participle.

You use it to describe events that will have taken place before another future action. You

can also use the future perfect alone to express that a future action will have been com￾pleted by a certain time in the future. The meaning of this tense in English is will have done

something. You can also use the future perfect to express a probability or a supposition. For

example, Paul n’est pas venu à l’école hier. Il aura été malade means Paul did not come to

school yesterday. He probably was/must have been ill.

Like the simple future tense (see Chapter 15), you use the future perfect with expressions

that imply a future action, such as when and as soon as. In this chapter, you discover how to

form the future perfect tense and how to correctly use it.

Forming the Future Perfect

The future perfect tense is a compound tense, and it follows the same pattern as all other

past compound tenses in French. You need one of the two auxiliaries, avoir (to have) or

être (to be), followed by the past participle of any verb you want.

You form the future perfect by putting the auxiliaries in the future tense and adding the past

participle of the verb of your choice. Remember that the choice of the auxiliary depends on

the verb. Most verbs take the auxiliary avoir, and some take être. (For a list of these verbs

and for the formation of the past participles, see Chapter 12.)

First, you need to know how to conjugate avoir and être in the future tense. After you conju￾gate the auxiliary, you add the past participle.

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