How many clients have you been signing this month?

[no_duality]

Yes, it can, but the sentences you quoted are nearly all flawed.

The problem with that is the choice of verb and the time marker. A better example:
How many of your medicines have you been avoiding since talking to that quack?

The perfect continuous highlights a period (length) of time, not so much a discrete number of times/incidences. Thus, "how many times" does not really work with it.

That's just about possible; for example, if she had started writing several poems and not finished them before she died in 2010. However, even in such a context, it would be better to say: "How many poems had she started writing before 2010?", meaning the perfect aspect is somewhat awkward in it.

Can I say: “How many useless and harmful medicines had he been taking before they changed his diagnosis?’”?

 

[jutfrank]

Can I say: “How many men had she been sleeping with before her husband got suspicious and had her followed?’”?

Yes, good.

Can I say: “How many useless and harmful medicines had he been taking before they changed his diagnosis?’”?

Yes.

 

[no_duality]

The four examples below have been provided by Qwen. They are supposedly citations from authentic contemporary sources, not just the AI's emulations. I can’t vouch for that, but they look very realistic to me. I would like native English speakers here to give their verdict on these examples

How many households have your team been visiting per day since the vaccination rollout began in Lagos?

“How many meals have you been skipping each week just to keep the lights on?” she asked Maria, a single mother in Bradford.

“I don’t know how long this has been going on,” she said. “But how many shifts have you been working at that diner? You look exhausted.”

When I ask young workers, “How many side hustles have you been juggling just to stay afloat?” the answer is rarely fewer than two.

 

[emsr2d2]

They all work for me.
What is Qwen?

 

[jutfrank]

They all seem perfectly authentic to me and I think they're also good examples.

 

[no_duality]

They all work for me.
What is Qwen?

Chinese AI: https://chat.qwen.ai/

 

[no_duality]

They all seem perfectly authentic to me and I think they're also good examples.

How about these? (I made them up myself)

1. How many small businesses have been losing money since the new tax was introduced?

2. How many engineers had been working at the plant before the 2024 layoff?

3. How many of your team members have been working remotely since the start of the pandemic?

4. “How many more of those boars had been ravaging our garden before I shot that one?” he wondered.

 

[jutfrank]

They look good to me.

 

[emsr2d2]

My only query with sentence 2 would be whether you're asking about the total number of employees who had ever worked there before the 2024 layoff, or the number of staff working there at the time of (or at least immediately before) the 2024 layoffs.

 

[no_duality]

My only query with sentence 2 would be whether you're asking about the total number of employees who had ever worked there before the 2024 layoff, or the number of staff working there at the time of (or at least immediately before) the 2024 layoffs.

I suppose the second variant is implied here.
Oh, btw, can I use "variant" in this context?

 

[Tarheel]

@no_duality How important is it to you that people understand what you are saying?

 

[jutfrank]

My only query with sentence 2 would be whether you're asking about the total number of employees who had ever worked there before the 2024 layoff, or the number of staff working there at the time of (or at least immediately before) the 2024 layoffs.

I suppose the second variant is implied here.

I find it hard to imagine an interpretation where the question is asking about people who had left at a time before the layoff, since the layoff is what caused the number of people in the workforce to drop. The question then has to be about the time of the layoff, which makes the time marker 'before' a questionable choice. For this reason, I think the sentence would be greatly improved with 'up until' instead:

How many engineers had been working there up until the 2024 layoff?

Oh, btw, can I use "variant" in this context?

No. You mean 'interpretation'.

 

[no_duality]

With this "How many + the perfect continuous" type of question I myself still don't seem to quite understand what I'm saying (asking).

My only solace is that this pattern doesn't seem to be common at all. Why?

Well, how many native English speakers here have been writing back to me in this thread? And how many examples of the pattern have they provided so far?

Let's see. @teechar answered once; his explanation definitely helped, although it contained only one example of the pattern. @5jj answered a couple of times, only one of his answers being related to the pattern though, with no examples of the pattern provided. @Tarheel wrote a couple of times, providing no examples of the pattern.
@jutfrank and @emsr2d2 have been keeping up the conversation, for which I'm very thankful to both of them; however @emsr2d2 provided no examples of his own and @jutfrank provided only one example (very cool and vivid, btw; a special thanks to that).
So, we've got two examples per five people; not much.

I faced a similar situation on another platform, people there mostly providing theoretical reasoning with 0 to 1 examples of the pattern per person, even though I specifically asked for examples and their personal experience with the pattern.

 

[jutfrank]

I myself still don't seem to quite understand what I'm saying (asking).

This is why it's important to study authentic contextualised examples of use rather than inauthentic, unnatural ones that lack any pragmatic meaning. If you want to practise making up your own sentences, get the meaning very clear in mind before attempting to construct the thought grammatically, not the other way round.

 

[no_duality]

This is why it's important to study authentic contextualised examples of use rather than inauthentic, unnatural ones that lack any pragmatic meaning. If you want to practise making up your own sentences, get the meaning very clear in mind before attempting to construct the thought grammatically, not the other way round.

That's the problem: I cannot find these 'authentic contextualised examples of use', and when I ask native English speakers for those examples, I'm hardly getting any.

To ‘get the meaning very clear in mind before attempting to construct the thought grammatically’ I must get the feel of that grammatical construction first (as in my native language there’s nothing of the kind, and it would not even occur to me to inquire about what the pattern being discussed here implies), which brings me back to ‘studying authentic contextualised examples’ I’m trying so hard to gather.

Here's a section of my request that I posted on another platform: "I would also appreciate NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS sharing if they personally use it or have used it recently. Or, alternatively, have heard/ seen it used – by a neighbor, acquaintance, clerk, barber, taxi driver, coach, etc., or in a movie, stand-up comedy, theatrical performance, interview, TV commercial, etc.; or in a novel, newspaper article, blog, social media post, etc." "It" refers the the pattern being discussed here.
It received no replies.

 

[jutfrank]

That's the problem: I cannot find these 'authentic contextualised examples of use', and when I ask native English speakers for those examples, I'm hardly getting any.

I suggest you ask English teachers as this is precisely what we do. I personally consider a large part of my job to be crafting inauthentic example sentences for study. I've always found that the average non-teacher is often quite hopeless at this kind of thing. With time and skill, you can sometimes get AI tools to build good examples for you, but it's very hard to then get them to explain the semantics without training them specially to do so, so beware.

It received no replies.

In this case, that may be because there is no 'pattern' as such where 'how many' is used in a perfect continuous clause. Going back to post #2 of this thread, the takeaway lesson is that these two things don't naturally combine well and so any real example of use is going to be very rare. The natural question of a perfect continuous clause is about duration (how long) rather than quantity (how many).

How long have you been thinking about this point? [focus on ongoing duration]
How many people have you asked for examples? [focus on completion]

 

[no_duality]

"... these two things don't naturally combine well and so any real example of use is going to be very rare. The natural question of a perfect continuous clause is about duration (how long) rather than quantity (how many)."
That's how I myself felt initially and have been doing my best to get native English speakers to either explicitly admit that "any real example of use is going to be very rare" or prove otherwise by providing those examples.
So, thank you. for verbalizing what I've been waiting to hear.

Since none of the other teachers involved in this discussion has said anything contrary to your latest statements, I suggest we consider my question finally answered and fully clarified, thus wrapping up the discussion.

 

[emsr2d2]

I'll lock the thread, then. However, when you next start a thread, please limit your use of block capitals, boldface and multiple colours. It makes the posts quite hard to read, plus the teachers etc here like to use bold and colours when making corrections to posts. There is nothing wrong with putting your whole post in black and using quotation marks or italics when quoting someone else's words.