The second sentence is just incorrect.  Don't pile on helping verbs like "have" more than one at a time, cowboy!

mezbup wrote:

google shows 400K results for that construction... but got it sounds a bit wordy. Eek I find it a little confusing myself, I can't imagine how much of a mindfuck it would be to a learner.

The Google results most likely turn up 'having had' where 'had' is serving a possessive function or whatever. (Edit: In other words, having as 'being in a state of' has a kind of self-conscious rhetorical flourish here, when describing the past tense possession that is now being brought to bear so the possession is still somehow current. Or something.)

Edit: Ohh, I see what you mean. Haha. I would never use that, I think that's just 'wrong' (in the descriptive grammar sense ;p). They probably 'thought' of it like a possessed object, rather than a verb, though. For instance, you could rewrite the second sentence as "having had French studies" ... they probably did something like that in their head.

In fact, scanning through the 50 Google hits, nearly all of the results for 'having had studied' are informal. I saw a handful of magazine articles/papers with that construction, but I imagine those just slipped past the editor, if they had one.

As you see above, I just noted there were 50 Google hits. Notice how Google does that, even after you tell it not to omit hits? What's the deal, how does it go from 400,000 to 49...

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 1:46 am)

thistime wrote:

ruiner wrote:

They probably 'thought' of it like a possessed object, rather than a verb, though. For instance, you could rewrite the second sentence as "having had French studies" ... they probably did something like that in their head.

Thanks but the "they" is actually me. My student (Japanese) insisted that having had done is grammatically incorrect and I (American) insisted it wasn't. I don't know.

If I do an exact wording search in google "having had studied" brings up 373,000 responses. "having had gone" brings up 2.3 million. "having had seen" 2.2 million.

Here are a few more examples:

Having had eaten a sizable group lunch that day, we decided to get some beers.

I owe my great attitude to having had gone to school and learning many different things.

Having had seen this show on Broadway, I was very excited to hear there was a tape of a live performance available.

Having had already read the book I wasn't sure that I would get as much out of the movie, but I was wrong.

Having had finished 7th in 1998-1999, Liverpool needed a facelift.

I would consider all of those awkward and 'incorrect', hehe. There's actually only about 50 viewable examples on Google, despite the 400k hits (see above). I don't think there are 400,000 unique uses of such a construction. Maybe I'm wrong though. ;p

Try clicking as many pages as you can for any of those hits, you'll see there's not nearly as many as first appear. "Having had gone" = 106 (around 250 hits after you tell Google not to omit anything). You'll find even fewer such instances on Google Books, except where I noted the 'possessive' sense...

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 3:26 am)

Asriel wrote:

I think it comes down to whether or not you put the comma.

Having [past experience] [result]
Having had [past experience], [result]

I don't know much about grammar, but when I first read the one about Paris, it sounded fine to me, because I somehow automatically added the comma when I read it.
Going it over a second time, however, having had read both of them, I had a better perspective of what the differences between the two were. (see what I did there?)

No, the comma doesn't make it 'right'. ;p I think you've gotten sucked into the semantic satiation in this thread from repeatedly 'testing' it in your head. lol. Or is that 'syntactic satiation'. You'll see it with a kind of rhetorical tone used to denote a past possession with contextual relevance. "Having had a French class, I was ready to go to Paris... " ; "Having had an appetite for sweet foods, my teeth are still falling out... " ; "Having had such great times, I vowed never to speak of that weekend again... " -- I think it's most often in those 'spaces' that people will insert words, such as "Having had taken a French class... " and it's quite possible that an accumulation of such brain glitches will make this a less awkward form. I'm really interested in trying to catch that sort of mutation in action (especially when it involves chunking groups of words into individual semantic items)...

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 2:58 am)

Asriel wrote:

John, wheras Peter had had 'had', had had 'had had'. 'Had had' had had the most marks in the exam.

Actually, I just Googled 'syntactic satiation' and it's recognized as a sort of 'linguist's disease' that they're working on the 'etiology' of... it'll be interesting to discover the underlying processes at work there. I thought I made it up just now.

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 3:23 am)

So, I think that if your dialect accepts 'having had' + a past-tense verb form then it is non-standard. Personally I would agree with coverup and ruiner: to me "having had + noun phrase" or "having had to verb" are fine but not any of the examples you've suggested, all of which need the 'had' removing. The first example (only) could also be changed to "having had to study French", which has a sense of compulsion that "having studied" does not.

(UK English, southern.)

magamo wrote:

pm215 wrote:

So, I think that if your dialect accepts 'having had' + a past-tense verb form then it is non-standard.

They're not having had + a past tense verb.

I don't do English grammar terminology, I just speak it :-). (Given 'eaten' in one of the examples you're right that 'past tense' isn't really right, though.)

I don't think they're "standard" (whatever that means).

Roughly, non-standard == 'would be corrected if used in a formal or semiformal situation like an English exam or a newspaper article'. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English .

Last edited by pm215 (2010 March 16, 4:36 am)

Having had studied French in school she was able to make her way around Paris easily.

So at the point in time of this sentence, there was a point in time in this girl's past when, from the perspective of that point in the time, she had studied French in the past.

Right.

This "double-barreled perfect" construction is nonsensical, and if I had to hazard a guess, I would presume that it originates from the misconception that "having + studied" is insufficient to express a past event.

JimmySeal wrote:

Having had studied French in school she was able to make her way around Paris easily.

So at the point in time of this sentence, there was a point in time in this girl's past when, from the perspective of that point in the time, she had studied French in the past.

Right.

This "double-barreled perfect" construction is nonsensical, and if I had to hazard a guess, I would presume that it originates from the misconception that "having + studied" is insufficient to express a past event.

Curses! I was just getting ready to use my newly learned jargon with words like 'perfect' to describe what I previously meant, but you nailed it very concisely. Maybe if I ever decide to consistently explain grammar to people in more formal contexts, I will learn some jargon like 'pluperfect'.

(Okay, I know, I could be a tad more concise even without jargon. I'll think about it.... )

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 5:12 am)

The 'studied' in the first sentence isn't past tense of the verb, it's the past participle (p.p).
'Had' in the second sentence is the p.p of 'have'. The p.p of a verb is often the same as its past tense which I suppose could be annoying to many learners.
eat, ate, eaten
speak, spoke, spoken
have, had, had
study, studied, studied

The second sentence is incorrect. 'Have' + p.p is a common English construction which Japanese kids learn in the 3rd year of Junior High School but you can't have two past participles appearing next to each other (*there is one exception). Even if one of them is past tense, its still incorrect because the past tense of a verb can only appear in initial position. It might be best to think of the past participle and the 'ing' form as a nomilisation of the verb, because then you can apply the following rule. You can never have two verbs appearing next to each other in English.

*the exception: the P.P can appear after 'been' (which is the p.p of 'be'). Example:
After having been eaten by a lion....

Last edited by nadiatims (2010 March 16, 5:42 am)

Maybe rephrasing the sentences would have been helpful.

As she has studied French in school, she was able to make her way around Paris easily.
As she has had studied French in school, she was able to make her way around Paris easily.

You can see that the second one makes no sense. It seems like somebody has assumed 'having' is unconnected to the verb 'study', and then gone on to re-conjugate the perfect. Since it ended up as past perfect, it makes even less sense, as it should be relevant to what she's doing now.

It could also be that 'had + infinitive' for obligation has been confused. Having had to study French at school.

Remember that even native speakers make a crap load of errors, and that Google indexes them indiscriminately along with everything written by foreigners. I couldn't find an example of 'having had' that makes logical sense. It seems like a lot of people aren't aware of the difference between present and past perfect. Think about why you wouldn't say something like 'I'd been to France five times, and I'm going again this summer,' and you can start to see why those results are all bogus. There's a complete disjoint in the timeframes.

magamo wrote:

ruiner wrote:

@magamo

Actually the OP didn't seem to realize that the second sentence was simply incorrect in pretty much any context that I can think of--according to current uses of 'having' and 'had' in any given context, so I took the opportunity to correct them sans jargon, since the student already knew. ;p Frankly I don't think jargon is useful in any context and should be banned from all grammar teaching. If linguists want to talk to one another with a formalized set of terms within such a formally agreed upon context, that's fine, though. ;p

Yeah, I doubt grammar jargon is useful in teaching. But I don't think not knowing it and not teaching it are the same. Students may not need them, but I do think teachers should be familiar with grammar and technical things. For example, if a teacher knows a little about grammatical explanations about participial clauses, it's not difficult to see that the second example in OP is just another typical hypercorrection or "misconception that 'having + studied' is insufficient to express a past event" as JimmySeal put it.

Also, I don't think using grammar jargon is the only method to teach grammar. Giving a couple examples with a short non-technical explanation is also grammar teaching if you believe grammar exists in language; if what they're teaching with the examples isn't grammar, what's grammar in language? A set of technical terms? I guess quite a few would agree that the logic flowing underneath consciousness of native speakers is also qualified as grammar, and probably this is what examples and non-technical explanations are teaching.

I imagine we're pretty much in agreement (http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=67789#p67789 + the link within the link), though I'd like to clarify that I think the student/teacher distinction is increasingly unnecessary except within specific circles of analysis (where the majority of the 'jargon' is required, and that's why I said 'linguist' rather than 'teacher' before), and I think it's unnecessary for the knowledge of the language logic/dynamics, and that intimate descriptive linguistic meta-awareness should be built and come first in order to make it common and easy for everyone. I can only speculate at how many times a conventional teacher interrupted an otherwise clear explanation, intruded into a student being kind of 'in the zone' of understanding, to stop and say 'we call this the reduced gerund pluperfect nominal clause phrase blah blah, write that down, here's a chart... ' and how this contributes to the misconception that 'grammar is hard/useless'. I think they start using the terms for obvious practical reasons, but end up getting trapped in the system of linguistic categories and shaping explanations/classes around that system at the expense of clarity and the ability to match the speed of language change across contexts... Perhaps I'll start calling it 'poetry' instead of grammar...

There's little hard knowledge of the phenomenon at the moment, but I imagine that previously mentioned 'syntactic satiation' which occurs when constantly faced with right/wrong examples that require comparison, especially when followed by externalized explanation, is something one must become inured to--I wonder if that's a problem many native speakers turned tutor fall victim to at different points. I've always made a point to think about my own language, so I don't have problems with it (except my usual refusal-inability to be clear on this forum, hehe), despite never learning grammatical terms. In other words, I don't think the terms are relevant to the awareness, but they are useful for communicating that perspective quickly. The question is, to what extent should they be agreed upon and used, and how fluid and specific to a context (simple communication skills determining such things between two parties)... I actually don't think the 'pluperfect', etc., is that bad, I simply chose originally to give an entirely 'homebrewed' explanation as part of a larger point (a disingenuity I seem to often adopt here)...

At any rate, just wanted to riff on that a bit, I think we're mostly in agreement? Overall...

Last edited by ruiner (2010 March 16, 1:54 pm)