I have an argument with a couple of friends about the following situation:
I want to meet someone on Monday, in the future, but I can't because I will be out of the country. So I told him:
I would have met you on Monday, but I will be out of the country.
A few friends said it is wrong, and should be something like:
I would meet you on Monday, but I will be out of the country.
Which one is correct?
They're both correct. The first uses what's known as a doubly remote conditional.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p754,
The doubly remote conditional construction
i If you had told me you were busy I would have come tomorrow.
ii If you had come tomorrow you would have seen the carnival.
iii If your father had been alive today he would have been distraught to see his business disintegrating like this.
Ordinary remote conditionals have preterite tenses (or irrealis mood) expressing modal remoteness, not past time. In [48] the underlined perfect auxiliaries have also express modal rather than temporal meaning. In [i] the apodosis situation is future; in [ii] both protasis and apodosis situations are future; and in [iii] both situations are located in present time.We refer to this, therefore, as the doubly remote conditional: the remoteness is signalled twice, once by the preterite inflection, once by perfect have.
Where the time is future the doubly remote construction indicates not only that P and Q are false, but also that the possibility of the future situation being actualised has already been foreclosed by a past event. In [i–ii], for example, it might be that I or you have come today, with the assumption that that precludes our coming again tomorrow.
If the protasis (conditional adjunct) were present, the doubly-remote version would require a have in the protasis as well. The other would exclude it.
(If I could have met you on Monday), I would have met you on Monday, but I will be out of the country.
(If I could meet you on Monday), I would meet you on Monday, but I will be out of the country.
Fanchette, at Word Reference_Forum, states:
In 'Grammar in context' by Hugh Gethin I found the information: 'Sometimes the conditional or past tense is 'shifted back' to the conditional perfect or past perfect to give a sentence with uniform tense use:
- I would have come with you tomorrow if I hadn't already promised...
...
[Is this really grammatical? What does 'sometimes' imply?]
To which Cagey responds:
It's difficult to answer your question, because [this sentence is not a construction] I would use, though I can understand what [it is] supposed to mean.
Instead of
- I would have come with you tomorrow if I hadn't already promised...
if I were turning down an invitation, I might say:
- I would come with you tomorrow if I hadn't already promised....
I'll add that I find the initial sentence unremarkable, quite acceptable.
It is true that 'I would have met you on Monday' is incorrect according to the standard textbook rules if Monday is in the future, because 'would have met' is, according to these rules, to be used only for the past. Nevertheless, if one doesn't think about the rules, the wording does not strike one as incorrect. Why?
The explanation is that even though 'I would have met you on Monday' is, on its face, about the future, it is implicitly about the past decision whether to meet the person on Monday. One can thus interpret 'I would have met you on Monday' as an abbreviation of something like 'I would have decided yesterday to meet you on Monday'. When the sentence is interpreted that way, the use of 'would have' in it ceases to be problematic.
'I would have met you' indicates the past, not the future. So the first sentence is not correct.
Past- could have + past participle, should have + past participle, must have + past participle, would have + past participle
'Would' is used for a past prediction. He worked all day. He would sleep well.
We can say 'I would like to meet you on Monday, but I will be out of the country.'
