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Glossary entry

English term or phrase:

What you been doing?

English answer:

Present perfect continuous (informal spoken)

Added to glossary by Yvonne Gallagher
Nov 11, 2018 14:36
5 yrs ago
English term

What you been doing?

English Other Education / Pedagogy Confusing Tense
From Hotel Transylvania Movie

Frankenstein: Hey, buddy, what you been doing?
Drac: Never mind that. What you been doing?
(Drac was hiding things on his friend all the time)

What is the tense of this phrase?

thank you
Responses
4 +8 Present perfect continuous
4 ungrammatical, should be present perfect tense
4 ungrammatical
Change log

Nov 22, 2018 17:22: Yvonne Gallagher Created KOG entry

Discussion

Oliver Simões Nov 12, 2018:
Present Perfect Continuous Unless I learned it wrong in the Master's program in ESL and Celce-Murcia is wrong, the present perfect continuous is perfectly acceptable for an action that started in the past and is not finished. Example: "What have you been doing since midnight?" "I've been studying the present perfect continuous." - https://www.englishgrammar.org/difference-present-perfect-pr...
Sheila Wilson Nov 12, 2018:
Present perfect I don't understand some of the disagreements here. Unless I taught it wrong for 15 years, there's not just one present perfect tense; there are two - simple (have done) and continuous/progressive (have been doing). The tense in question here is not the PPS, but it is (or should be) the present perfect.

Responses

+8
17 mins
Selected

Present perfect continuous

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/present-perfect-continuous-te...

but perfectly fine and commonly used without the auxiliary Have in comversational English

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Note added at 1 hr (2018-11-11 15:37:27 GMT)
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https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/intermediate-gram...
Peer comment(s):
agree B D Finch : Imposing the grammar of written English onto spoken English was partly responsible for the BBC sounding so stilted in the 1930s (and quite a lot later too).
57 mins
Many thanks. Yes indeed and not just the BBC...!
agree Uygar Kibar
1 hr
Many thanks:-)
neutral Tony M : Without the 'have' acceptable as it may be in speech, it cannot be the perfect; in this case, without 'have', it drops back to being an imperfect continuous — there is no implication that the action has finished.
2 hrs
The "have" is implied here, just dropped as is common in speech. And who said the action was finished?
agree Charles Davis : Of course "have" is implied and this is present perfect continuous. The present perfect would be "what have you done?". Tony's suggestion that this is an imperfect continuous (which would be "what were you doing?") is bizarre to my mind and clearly wrong.
8 hrs
Many thanks:-) Yes, Tony's suggestion makes no sense to me either but I see he's dropped his agree to it being present perfect which I also found rather odd
agree Katalin Horváth McClure
8 hrs
Many thanks:-)
agree Oliver Simões
14 hrs
Many thanks:-)
agree Arabic & More
20 hrs
Many thanks:-)
agree katsy
21 hrs
Many thanks:-)
agree D. I. Verrelli : The informal spoken version I think is more commonly phrased with "you" so unstressed that it becomes closer to "What ya been doing?", or even "Whatcha bin doin'?". Perhaps "What _you_ been doing?" with stressed "you" occurs in some regional variants.
21 days
Many thanks:-)
Something went wrong...
3 KudoZ points awarded for this answer.
2 mins

ungrammatical, should be present perfect tense

What have you been doing?
Peer comment(s):
agree Patricia Fierro, M. Sc.
13 mins
Thank you.
agree philgoddard : Yes, it's ungrammatical in written English, but very common in speech.
48 mins
Thank you.
disagree Yvonne Gallagher : sorry Jack but it's Present Perfect Continuous without "have". But you yourself wrote it as "What have you been doing" which is Present Perfect Continuous!
56 mins
If it's without "have" it isn't perfect (in the grammatical sense.//Yes, what I wrote was Present Perfect Continuous. because it includes "have", but the query text is not.
disagree B D Finch : It's colloquial and film scripts are supposed to read like speech.
1 hr
It is both colloquial and ungrammatical. I may be wrong but I assume the asker wants to know what it should be.
neutral Charles Davis : You are quite right that it is equivalent to "what have you been doing?", but this tense is not the present perfect (which would be "what have you done?") but rather the present perfect continuous. It is informal rather than ungrammatical.
8 hrs
disagree Oliver Simões : I beg to disagree. Despite its colloquial usage, I don't see anything wrong with this verb tense in this particular context. Supposedly, the action started in the past and continues into the present (i.e. it's an ongoing action).
14 hrs
agree Sheila Wilson : 100% with Phil's comment. Present perfect tense is the grammatical one here - continuous/progressive rather than simple
19 hrs
Thank you.
Something went wrong...
4 days

ungrammatical

what have you been doing?
Peer comment(s):
neutral Tony M : As several have already pointed out, although this appears not to follow the rules of grammar, at least as far as written EN is concerned, the simple fact is it is commonly used in "English as she is spoke", and the rules will just have to catch up.
40 mins
Something went wrong...
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