There are regions in the land of grammar that make for rugged terrain. One is the infinitive and another is the conditional sentence, and where those two masses meet the land gets steep. You can find a sentence there like this one, which is similar in construction to one I read recently in the news: In order to meet her competitor’s price, she would have had to have used inferior materials. Is the second half of this sentence correct, or should it simply read she would have had to use inferior materials? Watch your step.
Let’s begin by framing out the sentence. The comma separates the statement into halves, the former an adverbial phrase and the latter a clause. That clause is subordinate (which we know either by recognizing the subjunctive verb form would have, or by using the empirical test that it does not state any complete sense on its own). Subordinate clauses alone cannot make up a grammatically complete statement, so a sentence like this is said to be abridged, with essential parts of its form omitted. This subordinate clause actually represents the concluding half of a conditional sentence: If she had wanted to meet her competitor’s price, she would have had to have used inferior materials. This kind of conditional sentence is called a past contrary-to-fact, because it is entirely hypothetical: it has to do with the theoretical world of ideas, not with our common world of things and events occurring in space and time.
The opening half of the sentence we can safely ignore, and concentrate instead on the subordinate clause, where our question pertains. The subject of that clause is she, and the predicate is made up of two parts, the finite verb phrase (would have had) and an infinitive (to have used); the phrase inferior materials is simply the object of the infinitive, and like the opening phrase will play no part in our analysis. The first big obstacle, though, is the verb have, which appears in some form no fewer than three times in this predicate. If we can sort this out, our path ahead is largely clear.
As a verb in its own right, to have most commonly means to hold or to possess: I have a pen in my hand, or I have an advanced degree in chemistry. That same common verb have is also regularly used as an auxiliary verb to form the three perfect tenses in English: I have eaten lunch (the present perfect), I had eaten lunch (the past perfect), and I will have eaten lunch (the future perfect). There are also a number of idiomatic phrases in which have is used with a special meaning. Relevant to our example is the construction have plus an infinitive, which conveys the idea of necessity or obligation: I have to go means I must go. (Perhaps this peculiar construction originated from the fact that the idea of being under an obligation is close to the idea of being held or possessed by someone or some authority, where one’s will has been suspended.)
If we return, now, to the subordinate clause, we can understand how the three instances of have are each being used in our example. In the phrase would have had, both would and have are auxiliary verbs, would to form the subjunctive mood and have to build the perfect tense. The last verb in a verb phrase is always the principal, or root, verb, so the entire phrase constitutes the perfect subjunctive form of the verb have (had is the participle of have, and the participle is always the last to appear in a perfect tense verb phrase). If we then look to the infinitive phrase which follows, to have used inferior materials, that instance of have simply constructs the past infinitive of the verb to use. We can see, therefore, that the entire phrase would have had to have used intends to express a past necessity or obligation on the subject’s part to use inferior materials—had she wished to meet her competitor’s price.
From the speaker’s point of view, all of this took place in an imaginary past, and so the first part of the clause, would have had, is entirely correct as a past subjunctive, which cannot state something as a fact in time. The past infinitive attached to that construction, however, points to the past as well, and therein lies the problem with the way the original sentence was constructed. Infinitives do not mark real time, but relative time; not time according to the clock, but time according to contemporaneity, priority, or subsequence relative to another verb. A perfect infinitive such as to have used pushes the action before the already past tense of would have had, so it’s enough to say simply she would have had to use inferior materials. It’s not so much that there is a mistake in using the perfect infinitive (because the whole sentence is a hypothetical condition and so there’s no mark of real time), but that it is redundant. And that makes for a messy sentence.
As one traditional usage manual (Evans and Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, 1957) puts it, to use the past infinitive instead of the present in a sentence like this is not the better choice, “simply because it isn’t neat.” And that puts the summit we’re climbing for right smack in view, because good writing, really good writing, is above all precise, trim, smart—in a word, neat.
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