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I know we use Past Perfect Continuous when an event in the past continue up until another event in the past:

I had been talking with her for over an hour before Tony arrived.

  1. Can we use it when an event in the past continue up until a specific time in the past?

I had been talking with her until 8 o'clock.

I have the same question here with the Future Perfect Continuous:

  1. Can we use it if the event continues up until a specific time?

By 8 o'clock Tomorrow, I will have been jogging for 10 hours.
I will have been jogging for 10 hours until 8 o'clock Tomorrow.

Do we use the perfect continuous forms when an event continues up until an another event or time and even further in the past or the future?

I will have been jogging for 10 hours until 8 o'clock Tomorrow.

  1. That can mean I'll stop the jogging at 8 o'clock and it can mean I will continue my jogging after 8 o'clock. Is this right?

Thank you for the answer in advance!

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  • Hi @makaveli123, Welcome to EL&U, I am sorry but your question sounds too basic for this community. Why not try our sister community ell.stackexchange.com ? They're a more suitable site for beginners. Commented Dec 17, 2015 at 14:50
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    This is actually, to my mind, a difficult question.
    – TimR
    Commented Dec 17, 2015 at 14:53
  • I find it an intriguing question. There's a difference I don't grasp between "before X" and "until X". I could say "had been talking before X" but never "had been talking until X"
    – Al Maki
    Commented Jan 16, 2016 at 17:00

1 Answer 1

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I think this is one of those times where people respond differently to the aspectual elements of the verb in conjunction with other time markers. I will tell you what my own ear hears.

There is a very big difference between "By 10AM tomorrow" and "Until 10AM tomorrow", so I won't address your future question, only the Past Perfect Continuous.

OK I will be sitting in this chair until 10AM.

OK I was sitting in the chair until 10AM.

marginal, to my ear I had been sitting in the chair until 10AM.

I feel a little discord between the prospective sense of until and the retrospective aspect of the past perfect.

One way to make it sound better to me is to make it habitual, rather than incidental:

I had been {sitting in the chair until 10AM} all semester.

Another way is to move the temporal phrase to the front, a difference that may be a specious difference. I'm just reporting what my "ear" hears.

Until 10AM, I had been sitting in the chair.

It's as if at the head of the statement, "Until 10AM" gets more easily translated to "Before 10AM" than it does when it's at the tail.

Another way is to add some additional time elements:

I had been sitting in the chair until 10AM, when there came a knock at the door.

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