Timeline for What's with the passive present perfect progressive?

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Jun 26, 2015 at 8:28	comment	added	Greg Lee		"Letters have been sending" is the way it would have been said up through the 19th century. The passive verbal construction was not generalized to the progressive aspect until the early 20th century. (And judging from some comments, perhaps it is now being lost.)
May 8, 2015 at 15:00	comment	added	H.R.Rambler		@PeterShor it's grammatical in the formulaic sense of "not contradicting rules of proscribed construction" as well as having discernible semantic/syntactic meaning. The other noteworthy point is that it is a very literalistic expansion of more common phrases that are themselves grammatical. I would theorize that "been being" is probably used more in grammar discussions than in daily life, and by quite a large margin; because it's explicit literalness aids in clarifying tenses and structures in other parts of a sentence. Random example: www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/bcg/lec04.html
May 8, 2015 at 14:31	comment	added	Peter Shor		If absolutely nobody uses it, and people feel that it's incorrect when they hear it, why do you say it is grammatical?
May 8, 2015 at 13:37	history	answered	H.R.Rambler	CC BY-SA 3.0