To clearly understand the form “have had + object of the verb,” as in “I have had breakfast,” let’s first take up the relevant meanings of the word “have” in this particular usage.
As we know, “have” can either be a main verb that means “to hold or maintain as a possession, privilege, or entitlement,” as in “to have a car” and “to have breakfast,” or be an auxiliary verb. As an auxiliary verb, “have” or its inflections (“has” and “had”) is used with the past participle of the verb to form
the perfect tenses, as follows:
(1)
The present perfect tense, which has the form “has or have + the past participle of the verb,” as in “has taken” for singular nouns and “have taken” for plural nouns;
(2)
The past perfect tense, which has the form “had + the past participle of the verb,” as in “had taken” for both singular and plural nouns; and
(3)
The future perfect tense, which has the form “will have + the past participle of the verb,” as in “will have taken” for both singular and plural nouns.
We will recall that in English, the present perfect tense is used to denote an action that happened at an unspecified time before now (the present moment), as in the sentence “I
have met that woman.” Take careful note that in the present perfect tense, the exact occurrence of the action isn’t specified in the sentence; in other words, the speaker or writer isn’t interested or isn’t in the frame of mind to give the precise time when the action took place. Instead, he or she just wants to indicate that the action happened some time before the very moment that he or she is describing it.
The Present Perfect Chart
For this reason, sentences in the present perfect can’t use specific time expressions like “yesterday,” “last week,” “last month,” “when I was a teenager,” and “when the city was founded”; when this is done, the sentence is no longer in the present perfect but in the simple past tense. Sentences in the present perfect can be constructed with no time expression at all, as in the sentence “I have met that woman” earlier given as an example, or they can use unspecific occurrence expressions like “ever,” “never,” “once,” “before,” “already,” “many times,” “yet,” and “so far,” as in “I
have never met that woman,” “I
have met that woman
many times,” and “I
have not yet met that woman.”
One other very important thing to remember about the present perfect is that it's normally used in statements describing a personal or collective experience; in other words, it usually takes the form of a statement in the first-person singular, as in “I have met that woman,” or in the first-person plural, as in “We have met that woman.” It’s quite rare—and rather odd—to encounter third-person, present perfect sentence constructions like “He has met that woman” or “They have met that woman.” This is because the present perfect is strongly associated with statements as actually uttered by the speaker himself or herself, not as reported speech. (
Click this link for a discussion of reported speech in the Forum’s Student’s Sounding Board section.)
Now, when we come across sentences that use the form “I have had + object of the main verb,” as in, say, “I
have had breakfast,” what we are reading or hearing is the present perfect tense of “have” as the main verb in the sense of “to hold or maintain as a possession, privilege, or entitlement.” In the sentence “I have had breakfast,” the word “have” is the verb auxiliary for the present perfect, “had” is the past participle of the main verb “have” in the sense of “to hold or maintain as a possession, privilege, or entitlement,” and “breakfast” is the direct object of this main verb. The present-perfect sentence “I
have had breakfast” is actually the semantic equivalent of the present-perfect sentence “I
have already taken breakfast.”
Another use of the present perfect form “I/we + have had + object” is to denote several different actions that have occurred in the past at different times, while at the same time suggesting that the process isn’t finished yet and that more such actions are possible. We will therefore also encounter present-perfect sentences like the following: “I
have had six breakfasts and three dinners
so far in this terrific restaurant.” “We
have had a number of false alarms
while guarding this restricted facility.”
While we are at it, we might as well also contrast the present-perfect “have had” form with the past-perfect “had had” form so we can avoid confusing one with the other.
When “have” is used as the main verb in a sentence, its past perfect tense takes the form of “had had,” as in “She
had had breakfast
by the time we reached home.” Usually, in sentences using the form “had had” like the example just given, the trigger for the past perfect are the time subordinators “when,” “until,” and “by the time.” These time subordinators are used to indicate that the past action being described took place after the occurrence of another past action; indeed, the “had had” form of past-perfect sentences always need another past action as a reference point.
Here are two more examples of sentences using the “had had” form: “The lost mountaineers
had had nothing to eat for five days
until they were rescued last week.” “After
she’d had a nap,
she felt very much rested.”
The thing about the “had had” form, though, is that in many instances, it sounds rather awkward when spoken. For this reason, many speakers would rather use its contracted form for ease of articulation, as in “
She’d had a nap so she felt very much rested” and “I
’d had another opportunity after not getting that job last year.” Also, in informal usage, many people simply get rid of the first “had” and construct the sentence in the simple past tense. Strict grammarians obviously will find fault with that omission, but doing it usually doesn’t seriously detract from the intended meaning of "had had" sentences like the following: “The lost mountaineers
had had nothing to eat for five days
until they were rescued last week.” “After she
had had a nap,
she felt very much rested.” Unless the sentence in question is part of a formal English-proficiency test like the TOEFL, TOEIC, or IELTS, we can routinely knock off the second “had” in such “had had” constructions for euphony’s sake without being penalized for it: “The lost mountaineers
had nothing to eat for five days
until they were rescued last week.” “After she
had a nap,
she felt very much rested.”
