Spanish: An Essential Grammar

Para entonces habré By then I’ll have finished.

terminado.

¿Lo habrá hecho Miguel? Could it be Miguel who did it?

The conditional perfect

The conditional perfect is used to refer to what would havehappened or

existed:

Adela nunca habría elegido una película tan violenta.

Adela would never have chosen such a violent film.

Especially in media contexts, like the conditional but in this case with refer-

ence to pastevents, the conditional perfect is used to suggest that the precise

facts are in doubt:

Chávez habría nacido en Arequipa en 1930.

Chávez appears to have been born in Arequipa in 1930.

For its use in conditional sentences see Chapter 13.

The past anterior

This is now confined to literature and extremely rare in speech. When used,

it is with reference to an action that hadoccurred before another in the

past. It is found primarily after temporal conjunctions such as después (de)

que ‘after’,cuando ‘when’,luego que ‘as soon as’,apenas ‘scarcely’, in

sentences where the main verb is in the preterite:

Después de que hubo salido, empezaron a criticarlo.

When he had left, they began to criticize him.

Apenas la hube visto, se fue.

Scarcely had I seen her when she left.

In modern Spanish the past anterior is replaced by the preteriteor, less

commonly, the pluperfect:

En cuanto vino, comenzó la reunión.

As soon as she had arrived, the meeting began.

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Uses of
tenses

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