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I am a bit confused

  1. It has been believed that people who read have developed better imagination

Is it still believed or is no longer believed? Is it closer to "it is believed" than "it was believed"?

  1. It might have been believed they have developed better imagination.

Is there a possibility of being believed now? Is it related to the present? Is " it might be believed the opposite in terms of time?

Is present perfect continuous usable? Or is just a grammatical structure?

ColleenV
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Viktor Dimitrov
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  • A perfect, whether active or passive, designates a state at Reference Time (present for present perfect, past for past perfect) which arises out of the prior event. What present state arises out of that past belief? – StoneyB on hiatus Jun 27 '17 at 09:48
  • And what is the answer? Is it still believed in "it has been believed" because when is said " the dinner has been cooked" actually the dinner has been cooked yet. – Viktor Dimitrov Jun 27 '17 at 10:14
  • I feel that i need to use present perfect continious passive in order to imply the idea of continious believe. Somthing like " it has being believed that..." – Viktor Dimitrov Jun 27 '17 at 10:17
  • Thank you very much for your help. We use different tense patterns in my language. – Viktor Dimitrov Jun 27 '17 at 10:34
  • Indeed you do! --and we are very grateful to the Slavic linguists who introduced us to the notion of grammatical Aspect. – StoneyB on hiatus Jun 27 '17 at 10:37

1 Answers1

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There is no need for the continuous construction: believe is a stative verb like know or love, and therefore inherently imperfective. A state is assumed to continue until it is explicitly terminated.

Consequently, if you write that Since Dunn's 1994 paper it has been believed that people who read become more imaginative, the implicature is that that proposition still believed. But it is only an implicature, not an entailment: it may be cancelled:

Since Dunn's 1994 paper it has been believed that people who read become more imaginative, but a new paper (Nowell 2016) calls this belief into question.

The use and meaning of the perfect is dependent on context. See §§ 3.1 Grammatical meaning and §§ 3.2 Pragmatic meaning of my post on the perfect construction for more (but hardly exhaustive) detail.

StoneyB on hiatus
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