perfect

  • In English grammar, the ‘perfect’ aspect is often incorrectly called a tense.
  • It indicates an action or circumstance that occurred before the time we are considering.  (perfect = complete)
  • Our attention is often focused on the result instead of what happened earlier.
  • The verb phrase/construction contains a form of ‘HAVE’ plus a past participle. 

If it hadn’t been for / had it not been for + modal

These are fixed expressions that are used to express a counterfactual or hypothetical situation in the past. They mean “if something had not happened, then something else would not have happened”. For example:

If it hadn’t been for your help, I would have failed the exam.
Had it not been for the storm, we would have arrived on time.

You can use different modals after these expressions, such as would, could, might. You can also invert the word order and omit “if”, as in the second example.

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