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A rare phenomenon
Supercomposite tenses, also known as supercompound tenses, or temps surcomposés in French, do not occur in English, or indeed in many other languages, but they are something I learned about during advanced studies in French grammar. In that language they stem from the French Academy's insistence on strict sequence of tenses and there are several of them. Of course, they are not used in everyday speech, but writers need to follow the rules.
A tense is said to be supercomposite if the verb form contains two past participles in the active voice, or three in the passive voice:
- Lorsqu'il a déjeuné, il est sorti. (Regarded as incorrect.)
- After he ate, he went out.
But:
- Lorsqu'il a eu déjeuné, il est sorti.
- When he had eaten, he went out.
The difference is subtle, and you might wonder why the French would not use avait déjeuné for had eaten. Well, it is a matter of aspect, which, in French, is less developed than in the Slavonic languages and is handled by the choice of tense and, in English, is dealt with by the use of continuous and progressive tenses. Actually though, this is the more likely construction in French:
- Après avoir déjeuné, il est sorti.
- After eating, he went out.
I told you that the supercomposite tenses were rare, even in French!
Well all those examples were in the active voice, but the same kind of thing happens in the passive voice:
- J'ai eu été envoyé.
- I had been sent.
The various examples above are taken from the article in French Wikipedia.
Sequence of tenses
Let us take a sentence:
- He says that he will have done it by Thursday.
- Il dit qu'il l'aura fait avant jeudi.
Now let us put it one stage back in the past:
- He said that he would have done it by Thursday.
- Il a dit qu'il l'aurait fait avant jeudi.[Note]
The tense of the verb in the subordinate clause has followed that of the one in the main clause. Now let us take it back another stage:
- He had said that he would have done it by Thursday.
In this case the tense in the subordinate clause remains unchanged. However, in French, strict sequence of tenses has to be observed and so we have to say:
- Il avait dit qu'il l'aurait eu fait avant jeudi.
For the record, that tense is the supercomposite conditional perfect.
Note - I did wonder whether, for reasons of aspect, one might come across:
- Il a dit qu'il l'aura eu fait avant jeudi.
Other languages
Although many languages use no supercomposite tenses at all, there are several in Europe which do have them, including dialects of various Romance, Germanic, Slavonic and Albanian languages.[1] In Central Franconian dialects of German they are widely used as alternatives to less complex tenses. For example:
You might expect:
However, you might hear:
- Ich habe geholfen gehabt.[2]
I notice that the word order follows the normal German pattern.
Finally, I recall seeing a claim that some Indo-Aryan languages have supercomposite tenses, but I have not been able to verify this.
References - Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe edited by Östen Dahl p.287
and The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect edited by Robert I. Binnick p.26 - The Dialects of Modern German: A Linguistic Survey edited by Charles Russ p.178
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