Kegunaan

Past Perfect Continuous digunakan untuk:

1. Durasi tindakan masa lampau sampai titik waktu tertentu di masa lampau juga
2. Kalimat-kalimat pengandaian (a) dan reported speech (b)

Bentuk

Subjek + had + been + verb+ing. Contoh:

• I had been running for an hour when it started raining. (Kegunaan 1)
• Mary said she had never been swimming so much in one day. (Kegunaan 2b)
• Kathy put on weight because she had been eating too much sugar (Kegunaan 1)
• When I saw him I knew that he had been training. (Kegunaan 1)

Bentuk bertanya memiliki pola sebagai berikut:

Had + Subjek + been + verb+ing. Contoh:

• For how many hours had Fred been painting the house when the ladder fell?
• How long had the player been playing before he scored?

Untuk bentuk negatif kita tambahkan not. Contoh:

• He said he wasn’t tired because he hadn’t been working that day. (Kegunaan 2b)
• If it hadn’t been raining, we would have played football. (Kegunaan 2a)
• Had I not been studying all night, I would have problems with this test now. (Kegunaan 2a)

Perbedaan Past Perfect dan Past Perfect Continuous

Past Perfect menekankan selesainya (atau hasil tindakan lengkap) sedangkan Past Perfect Continuous menekankan durasi atau aktivitas sebuah tindakan. Contoh:

• By the time we arrived, he had left the house. (Past Perfect)
• By the time we arrived, he had been playing poker with his friends for 2 hours. (Continuous)

Perbedaan Present Perfect Continuous dan Past Perfect Continuous

Past Perfect Continuous, berbeda dengan Present Continuous, tidak pernah menyatakan tindakan-tindakan yang berlanjut sampai sekarang.

• He has been playing for two hours. (Dia masih sedang bermain atau baru saja berhenti.)
• He had been playing for two hours when I arrived. (Dia tidak sedang bermain bola sekarang.)

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Rujukan:
http://www.englishtenseswithcartoons.com/page/tenses/past_perfect_cont