Example sentences of "they had been [v-ing] [adv] [prep] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Friends say they had been looking forward to the holiday for months . |
| 2 | They had been moving steadily through a very thick part of the forest in which it was impossible to maintain a constant direction for more than a few paces . |
| 3 | Then they had been sinking on to the bed and , between kisses and caresses , peeling the clothes hungrily from one another , until at last they lay naked , side by side . |
| 4 | And when they had been hiding out in Tom Rooney 's house , they had still fallen into the roles of master and maid , and on board ship Patrick 's attitude , influenced by Tom 's warning , had been stand-offish . |
| 5 | The authorities claimed that they had been living illegally on land which had been allocated to others , in Khartoum suburbs such as Karmuta where large numbers of mud-brick houses had reportedly now been vacated and then destroyed by bulldozers . |
| 6 | They had been living together across the colour bar for the best part of 30 years . |
| 7 | Now there is nothing to prevent plural continuation here ( e.g. They had been working hard for hours ) , but the incidence of such continuations was less than 5% , and continuations mostly were confined to singular references with individuals being in relatively stereotypical roles with respect to each other . |
| 8 | They had been heading back towards London when the strange conflict in the sky had been picked up by UNIT . |
| 9 | ‘ She said she had known for some time that she and Fabien could not remain at La Tour Monchauzet after their marriage — that they had been talking together about moving away — of going , perhaps , as far as Australia or California and starting a totally new life . |
| 10 | I 'd like to ask the convenor erm how would he have er replied to a young woman who came to me fairly recently whose husband had just left home by mutual agreement , and for the sake of their children and er she said to me after he had gone er that the home was a much happier place now that there was , they had been freed from the tension that they had been going through in a very difficult time . |
| 11 | One afternoon , after they had been travelling together for several days , Cleo ordered Dauntless to pull Contralto to a halt . |
| 12 | But they had been saying so for years , for more than a decade now . |
| 13 | Covertly , leaning far back in his chair , he watched McQuaid from under hooded eyelids : in all the years they had been coming together on Monaghan Day McQuaid had always spent the night in the house . |
| 14 | However , the FoE did welcome a number of proposals they had been campaigning on for some time . |
| 15 | They had been driving northwards from Copenhagen for half an hour along the beach road when Rune posed the question . |
| 16 | They had been sitting together at the top of their organisations throughout the years of cut-backs . |