PAST EVENTS AND PRESENT
TIME CONNECTED
Present Perfect and Past Perfect
SUMMARY
1 Both tense and aspect have to do with time relations expressed by the verb, but from different perspectives. While tense basically situates an event or state in present or past time, aspect is concerned with such notions as duration and completion or incompletion of the process expressed by the verb. English has two aspects, the Perfect and the Progressive. We first consider the Perfect aspect, noticing how it differs from the simple tenses.
2 The Present Perfect is a retrospective tense-aspect which views a state or event as occurring at some indefinite time within a time-frame that leads up to speech time.
3 The event is viewed as psychologically relevant to the present. By contrast, an event encoded in the Past tense is viewed as disconnected from the present.
4 Consequently, the Perfect is not normally interchangeable in BrE with the Past tense. For the same reason, the time adjuncts accompanying them are normally different. In AmE, but not BrE, the Past tense is often used, with the adverbs already or just (I just got up) where BrE uses the Perfect.
5 Implications of recency, completion and result, derived from the combination of Present Perfect and verb type, are all manifestations of current relevance.
6 The Past Perfect is used to refer to events more remote than, previous or relevant to those expressed by a past tense, but is also used in backshift and with a counterfactual meaning.
