In a posting in the Forum some years back, Forum member Annelize exclaimed that the English tenses were driving her insane. She was particularly befuddled by the following three exercises on the present perfect in an English-usage website:
1. “My best friend and I
have known each other for over fifteen years. We still get together once a week.”
Here, Annalize asked, why is the present perfect “have known” being used when the grammar rule says that we can’t use the present perfect with specific time expressions? Isn’t “fifteen years” a time expression?
2. “Stinson is a fantastic writer. He
has written ten very creative short stories in the last year. One day, he’ll be as famous as Hemingway.”
Considering that Stinson is expected to write more stories, Annalize asked, why is the present perfect “has written” being used in the first sentence? Is it because the second sentence describes “an uncompleted action that you are expecting”?
3. “I
have not had this much fun since I was a kid.”
Annalize asked: Does this sentence correctly use the present perfect, and if so, for what reason?
Here’s my reply to Annalize:In Statement 1, the first sentence, “My best friend and I
have known each other for over fifteen years,” correctly uses the present perfect. This is because “have known each other” conveys the idea that the situation has subsisted or continued up to the moment of speaking. The past tense isn’t used here because the phrase “for over fifteen years” is not a specific time of occurrence of an action; it’s actually only an adverbial modifier indicating a period or duration. If the time of occurrence of an action is specified, like “five years ago” in “My best friend and I first
met in a bookstore five years ago,” the past tense would be called for instead of the present perfect.
THE TIMELINE FOR THE PRESENT PERFECT TENSE
In Statement 2, the use of the present perfect “has written” in “He
has written ten very creative short stories in the last year” is grammatically incorrect. Since the action of writing the ten very creative short stories took place at a definite time in the past (“last year”), the sentence should use the simple past tense “wrote” instead, as follows: “He
wrote ten very creative short stories last year.” This should be the case even if the writing of the stories was spread out over the entire year; the determining factor for using the past tense in this case is that all of the writing for those ten short stories is now over.
In present perfect usage, the important thing to remember is that it’s called for if the action in the sentence has continued from some time in the past up to the present or at the very moment of speaking. An expectation expressed in a separate sentence that the action will or might continue in the future—in this case, the writing of more short stories until the writer probably becomes “as famous as Hemingway”—has nothing or little to do with determining the tense in the sentence that precedes it.
DIFFERENCES IN THE TIMELINE BETWEEN THE PRESENT PERFECT SIMPLE AND PAST TENSE SIMPLE
Lastly, as to Statement 3, “I
have not had this much fun since I was a kid,” it correctly uses the negative form of the present perfect tense. Here, what’s described is a situation that hasn’t happened from the time the speaker was still a child up to the present or the moment of speaking, when it finally did happen. It may come as a surprise to some, but the operative verb phrase in that sentence is “have had fun,” with “not” and “this much” as adverbial modifiers. The main verb in that verb phrase is actually “had” (the past participle of “have”), which in turn uses the auxiliary verb “have” to form the present perfect “have had.”
(2012)ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES FOR THE USAGE OF THE PRESENT PERFECT TENSE AND PAST TENSE
This essay appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the August 18, 2012 issue of The Manila Times
, © 2012 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
