2. Modal Verbs and Auxiliary Verbs. English Grammar Lesson

iam a somalian and i thought no one could teach me about verbs and then you came a long if keep listing to you i might go to college sooner than later

omg, ´will have been being played´ -.- ... in fact a huge combination. Thanks for the lessons.

oh my gosh... your my heroo!! i love how you explain everything!!

Hi, mrthoth.

I wanted to ask you if your future perfect continuous, i.e. your example of a five-verb sentence, is a legitimate sentence in American English. In British English, continuous is an impossible form with future perfect (at least according to the textbooks :-)). Not that you can't make it, you just don't say it.

I certainly hope there are no textbooks that say, "The future perfect progressive (or continuous) is impermissible." It is perfectly fine on either side of the Atlantic. ("By next week, I will have been working on this job for a year.") I just Googled the verb "will have been working," in fact, and got more than 45,000,000 hits. Certainly it's rarer in the passive than in the active, however. But if you Google "will have been being," you will get lots of examples of these five-word verbs.

Cheers for the reply.

I had an argument with a colleague where I proposed a similar scenerio to the one you describe for a five verb sentence. I said, "We can make a future continuous passive, but we just don't use it commonly"; he said, "Rubbish!"

The text we use, Cutting Edge, says the same as the Google sites from the search you suggest: 'It's uncommon'. But there's no point where the form is practiced in our text, so the implication is that it's 'wrong'.

Keep well.

Can auxiliary verbs only help modal verbs?

Yes, auxiliary verbs can appear without modals. For example, in "I am running the show," "am" is an auxiliary. It is very, very common for auxiliaries to appear without modals ("I do care," "I have forgotten," etc. etc.).

Thanks.
I have a few more question I don't see how Auxiliary verbs are hepling more than if you put run in place of them "I may be" "I may run" help!

Auxiliary verbs don't help "more" than modal verbs; you use them or don't use them according to what you want to say. "I would be running the show" and "I would run the show" can often be used interchangeably, but you would need the auxiliary if you wanted to stress the process of running the show.