It is easy to make up such examples, Brad, but since you speak a different English, one that does not allow it, the attempt would be fruitless.  Forming the auxiliary phrase in English had been being regularized over the centuries when Chomsky, who was a student in 1957, described the construction with a nifty statement on his way to developing the generative-transformational model.  Another student of that period, however, saw how futile the whole endeavor was and chose rather to deny the existence of any such construction in anyone's brain.  He felt that shifting the point of view into the past should be minimized by corrective actions, so that the shift that we had inherited from the learned Latin scholars and had gotten well used to in formal writing must even now be counted as illogical, indirect, or completely unnecessar y.

--- [log in to unmask] wrote:

From: Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Barron's Master the Basics
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 08:49:49 -0800

As is often the case, this will work better if you are set for html, color and graphics, by whatever name.
 
Barron's Master the Basics - English
                                    by Jean Yates, Northern Virginia Community College.
 
#9.3 Present Perfect Tense
 
This section starts with an inadequate definition but gives pretty good examples until ...
 
(f) to indicate that an action happened a very short time ago, use just or finally.
 
Pattern:  have + just     + past participle
              have + finally + past participle
 
<Have> Did they arrive<d> yet?   Yes they <have> did. They <have> just arrived.
What <has> happened?               The president <has> just left.
                                                     Our team <has> just won the tournament.
                                                     We <have> finally finished.
 
#9.4  Past Perfect Progressive Tense has similar problems. 
 
What had you been doing before you started to work? I had been studying for five years.
 
Nonsense. What did you do before you started to work? I studied for five years.   
 
Where had she been living before she bought this house? She had been living in an apartment for a long time.
 
Nonsense. Where did she live before she bought this house? She lived in an apartment for a long time.
 
Challenge. It is written that there is no such thing as a correct (i.e., reasonable) past perfect progressive. I challenge you to find one. I have only ever seen one that seemed to make sense but I cannot now find it. I challenge any and all to put one forth, or even make one up. I'll bet you can't do it.
 
Let's agree, ya wanna, that if no one can either find or create a reasonable example of the "past perfect progressive", we'll (a) not teach it and (b) do our best to get it eliminated from grammar texts.*
 
.brad.20dec10. 
 
* Note 'texts'. Online grammar sites are hopeless. They're so screwed up they will likely never be unscrewed. They are an embarrassment to the English Language.

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