‘Have you had a look’ or ‘Did you have a look?’
Two weeks ago, New Zealand-based Forum member Spelling—he used to post challenging English grammar questions in the Forum every now and then but had since lain low for almost two years now—surprised me with one more such puzzler: “Can you please help me with this? At the start of the weekend I ask someone to have a look at some documents over the weekend. What do I ask that person on Monday morning: ‘Have you had a look at the documents?’ or ‘Did you have a look at the documents?’”
Pleasantly surprised to hear from him (I must admit I’ve never figured out if he is a Filipino or a foreign national), I reminded him that it’s been such a long time since he asked for an explanation for the semantic difference between “Come here” and “Come to me,” and I expressed the hope that everything’s well with him in New Zealand despite the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic.
Regarding his latest grammar SOS, I came up with the following reply that I am now sharing with every interested grammar enthusiast almost verbatim, with only a few refinements for greater clarity:
If on a hypothetical Friday you ask someone “to have a look at some documents” over the weekend, the typical idiomatic way to ask that person the following Monday morning is to use the present-perfect interrogative “Have you had a look at the documents?” and not the past-perfect interrogative “Did you have a look at the documents?”
The most important thing to remember in such situations is that “have a look” is an idiomatic verb phrase where “have” isn’t functioning as an auxiliary or helping verb but as a transitive main verb in the sense of “obtain,” and neither is the word “look” functioning as a verb in that idiomatic phrase but as a noun in the sense of “a glance.” More to the point, “have a look at something” as a whole means “examine that something” or “study that something.” More precisely, the figurative statement “Have a look at the documents” literally means “Take the time or make the effort to (examine, read through, go over) the documents.”
For this particular usage of that idiomatic phrase, the present-perfect form “have had a look” is the correct tense to use. This is because the interrogative sentence regarding the action covers the entire period from the start of the weekend to the very point that you are asking the question. The past-perfect tense interrogative form “Did you have a look at the documents” will correctly apply only if your question have provided a specific time in the past for the action, as in, say, “Did you have a look at the documents (last Saturday, last Sunday, yesterday, last night?”
That’s admittedly a long and complicated explanation, but I assured Spelling that it’s the simplest I can manage to give for the tough grammar puzzler he had posed—the toughest that I think have been asked in the Forum for quite a long time now.
I then ended my reply with a friendly admonition to keep safe from Covid-19 in New Zealand or wherever it is that he might be residing or living now—the same admonition that I’ve been giving to every friend and acquaintance of mine since the outbreak of the nasty pandemic.
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As the
Times and its Campus Press section are currently constrained by the Covid-19 ECQ to continue page reductions till end April or beyond, this column might not always be accommodated in the paper’s print edition or Internet edition, or in both. Even so, I am assuring readers of uninterrupted online access to my weekly columns at Jose Carillo’s English Forum by simply clicking this link:
http://josecarilloforum.com/forum/.
Check out this column online in
The Manila Times:
“Have you had a look” or “Did you have a look?”(Next week:
The problem with overellipted sentence constructions) April 23, 2020
