would ( not ) have + PAST PARTICIPLE – English Grammar Profiler
has no past tense, however, would have followed by a past participle (such as made | liked | taken | gone | thought | happened, etc.) can be used to affirm actions that did not happen. In the following examples, I was not a mother, but I can imagine the past from a different perspective and state: I would have made a great mother. When this structure is found with conditional clauses, it can also express the possible result of a situation that was unlikely to happen. This is often referred to as the ‘third conditonal’. In the following example, you did not tell me and as a result, I did not take you. Because this structure contains two auxiliary verbs that can be contracted, many people contract them in two ways. Look, if I‘d seen him get on the plane, I would’ve gone and asked him for my money. We can see that both ways are almost equally common in the iWeb corpus:
- ‘D HAVE GONE 650
- WOULD ‘VE GONE 873
Here are negative example sentences with ‘not‘:
I would not have been able to graduate without your help.
listen
I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to come and see you.
listen
*Notice in the example above, the first ‘HAVE’ is the auxiliary verb and the second ‘HAD’ is the main verb or past participle.
would have + past participle examples
To look for the most frequent examples of ‘would have + PP‘, we can search in the iWeb corpus for:
would have _vvn
1 WOULD HAVE MADE 32292
2 WOULD HAVE THOUGHT 31800 C2
The following advanced example sentence expresses surprise / disbelief that I actually cooked something:
I mean who would have thought
that I‘d ever cook anything?
listen
3 WOULD HAVE LIKED 26488 4 WOULD HAVE TAKEN 19768 5 WOULD HAVE GONE 14581 6 WOULD HAVE LOVED 13844
7 WOULD HAVE GIVEN 13574
8 WOULD HAVE HAPPENED 11396
9 WOULD HAVE SEEN 10742 10 WOULD HAVE SAID 10316
11 WOULD HAVE PREFERRED 10293
12 WOULD HAVE EXPECTED 10040
I never would have expected that.
Here are all the past participles in ranking order found after “would have”. They have also been profiled with text inspector with the CEFR level.
To make would have + past participle negative, we just add a form of NOT between the auxiliary verbs.
would _XX have _VVN
1 WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED 2181
2 WOULDN’T HAVE THOUGHT 2151 (contracted) 3 WOULDN’T HAVE MADE 2100 4 WOULD NOT HAVE MADE 1980 5 WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED 1921 6 WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN 1785 7 WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN 1348 8 WOULD NOT HAVE KNOWN 1303 9 WOULDN’T HAVE GONE 1098 10 WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN 1039 11 WOULD NOT HAVE THOUGHT 1013 12 WOULD NOT HAVE OCCURRED 1004 13 WOULD NOT HAVE GONE 957 14 WOULDN’T HAVE WANTED 887 15 WOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED 847 16 WOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN 845 17 WOULDN’T HAVE TAKEN 826 18 WOULD NOT HAVE COME 815 19 WOULDN’T HAVE WORKED 770 20 WOULDN’T HAVE SEEN 738 21 WOULDN’T HAVE GOT 727 22 WOULDN’T HAVE BELIEVED 715 23 WOULD NOT HAVE WANTED 664 24 WOULD NOT HAVE WORKED 610 25 WOULD NOT HAVE SEEN 594 26 WOULDN’T HAVE COME 590 27 WOULD NOT HAVE BELIEVED 577 28 WOULDN’T HAVE MINDED 576 29 WOULDN’T HAVE GIVEN 569 30 WOULD NOT HAVE FOUND 568 31 WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN 565 32 WOULDN’T HAVE BOUGHT 555 33 WOULDN’T HAVE EXPECTED 546 34 WOULDN’T HAVE FOUND 541 35 WOULDN’T HAVE SAID 540 36 WOULDN’T HAVE MATTERED 539 37 WOULDN’T HAVE CHANGED 515 38 WOULD NOT HAVE ALLOWED 494 39 WOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT 485 40 WOULDN’T HAVE BOTHERED 456 41 WOULD NOT HAVE CHANGED 449 42 WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED 419 43 WOULD NOT HAVE EXPECTED 412 44 WOULD NOT HAVE DIED 395 45 WOULD NOT HAVE RECEIVED 390 46 WOULDN’T HAVE HELPED 385 47 WOULD NOT HAVE BECOME 376 48 WOULDN’T HAVE NEEDED 369 49 WOULDN’T HAVE WON 369
50 WOULDN’T HAVE SURVIVED 364
B1 past participles:
allowed, expected, noticed, required
One last very advanced example:
But it‘s incredibly unlikely
Wheatley would have been able to publicly condemn slavery
without serious consequences.
TED