The Future Tenses - Future Continuous - Structure and Usages
And now let's look at the future continuous tense. The future continuous tense is typically used to indicate an action in progress at a particular time in the future. To form this tense in the positive form, we have our subject, here we've used 'Karen', the word 'will', our auxiliary verb our helping verb 'to be' and then the present participle or the verb with 'ing', so 'Karen will be going'. In order to create the negative form, we keep with our positive form but add 'not' in between 'will' and our helping verb 'to be'. Finally, we ask a question by beginning with 'will', then we have our subject being sure to include our helping verb and the present participle: 'Will Karen be going?' Some of the more common usages for the future continuous tense are as follows. We can use them to speak about actions in progress at a future time, such as I'll be having lunch at 2 p.m. We can use it to predict the present because we're predicting, we wouldn't often predict something about ourselves so perhaps somebody has asked about a gentleman John and his whereabouts. You're not sure about his whereabouts, but you're going to predict it and you use the future form: 'I think John will be having lunch now.' We can also use it for polite inquiries, particularly where we don't want to influence the outcome. There are other ways to ask things but if we need to get the most accurate answer without influencing it, we could put it in a very polite form such as 'Will you be coming to the party?'
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