[Grammar] Once

[Jiayun]

Once the board have received your report, they will be in touch with you.

Is it correct to use 'have received' in the above sentence?

 

[SoothingDave]

Yes. This is more typical of BrE. Americans would say "has received," thinking of the board as a singular entity.

 

[Matthew Wai]

I think the simple present 'receive/receives' can also be used after 'once'.

Not a teacher.

 

[Jiayun]

Yes, actually I do not understand why present perfect tense is used here when there is no past action.

 

[SoothingDave]

http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/presentperfect.html

Topic 4: an uncompleted action you are expecting

 

[Jiayun]

I had checked that page before I asked that question. Not quite convincing because all the actions mentioned in those sample sentences actually already started in the past but in my case it is all hypothetical.

 

[Matthew Wai]

I do not understand why present perfect tense is used here when there is no past action.

Why do you think the action should have started in the past when the present perfect is applied to a future action?

Not a teacher.

 

[Jiayun]

Interesting. It never occurred to me that the present perfect tense could be applied to a future action. I did a bit more researches and found the following explanation which appeared to be a better answer to my question:

The Present Perfect is used in adverbial clauses of time after the conjunctionswhen, till, before, after, as soon as to denote an action completed before a definite moment in the future.

Don’t buy any more meat to-morrow until you have spoken to the mistress about it.

I am not going till you have answered me.

Another point to be considered is that if a virtual memory operating system is to be used, oncethe data tree has reached a certain size (known as the working set limit) variables created early on in the initialization will be written out to disc.

 

[Matthew Wai]

The Present Perfect is used in adverbial clauses of time after the conjunctionswhen, till, before, after, as soon as to denote an action completed before a definite moment in the future.

Could you tell me where you found it?

Not a teacher.

 

[Jiayun]

From a previous post in this forum.