The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and perfect aspect that is used to express a past event that has present consequences.[1] The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar to refer to forms like "I have finished". The forms are present because they use the present tense of the auxiliary verbhave, and perfect because they use that auxiliary in combination with the past participle of the main verb. (Other perfect constructions also exist, such as the past perfect: "I had eaten.")
Analogous forms are found in some other languages, and they may also be described as present perfect; they often have other names such as the German Perfekt, the French passé composé and the Italian passato prossimo. They may also have different ranges of usage: in all three of the languages just mentioned, the forms in question serve as a general past tense, at least for completed actions.
In English, completed actions in many contexts are referred to using the simple past verb form rather than the present perfect. English also has a present perfect continuous (or present perfect progressive) form, which combines present tense with both perfect aspect and continuous (progressive) aspect: "I have been eating". The action is not necessarily complete; and the same is true of certain uses of the basic present perfect when the verb expresses a state or a habitual action: "I have lived here for five years."
Auxiliaries
In modern English, the auxiliary verb used to form the present perfect is always to have. A typical present perfect clause thus consists of the subject, the auxiliary have/has, and the past participle (third form) of main verb. Examples:
Lovely tales that we have heard or read... (Endymion, John Keats)
Early Modern English used both to have and to be as perfect auxiliaries. The usage differs in that to have expressed emphasis in the process of the action that was completed, whereas to be put the emphasis in the final state after the action is completed. Examples of the second can be found in older texts:
I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not (John 5:43, The Bible)
In many other European languages, the equivalent of to have (e.g. German haben, French avoir, Italian avere) is used to form the present perfect (or their equivalent of the present perfect) for most or all verbs. However, the equivalent of to be (e.g. German sein, French être, Italian essere) serves as the auxiliary for other verbs in some languages, such as German, Dutch, Danish (but not Swedish or Norwegian), French, and Italian (but not Spanish or Portuguese). Generally, the verbs that take to be as an auxiliary are intransitive verbs denoting motion or change of state (e.g. to arrive, to go, to fall).
The present perfect in English is used chiefly for completed past actions or events when it is understood that it is the present result of the events that is focused upon, rather than the moment of completion. No particular past time frame is specified for the action/event. When a past time frame (a point of time in the past, or period of time which ended in the past) is specified for the event, explicitly or implicitly, the simple past is used rather than the present perfect.
The tense may be said to be a sort of mixture of present and past. It always implies a strong connection with the present and is used chiefly in conversations, letters, newspapers and TV and radio reports.[2]
It can also be used for ongoing or habitual situations continuing up to the present time (generally not completed, but the present time may be the moment of completion). That usage describes for how long or since when something has been the case, normally based on time expressions with for or since (such as for two years, since 1995). Then, the present perfect continuous form is often used, if a continuing action is being described.
For examples, see Uses of English verb forms §Present perfect as well as the sections of that article relating to the simple past, present perfect continuous, and other perfect forms.
German
Modern German has lost its perfect aspect in the present tense. The present perfect form implies the perfective aspect and colloquially usually replaces the simple past (except in the verb sein 'to be'), but the simple past still is frequently used in non-colloquial and/or narrative registers.
The present perfect form is often called in German the "conversational past" while the simple past is often called the "narrative past".
In Standard German, the sein-vs-haben distinction includes the intransitive-+-motion idea for sein ('to be') usage but is independent of the reflexive-voice difference when forming the Perfekt.
Ich habe gegessen ('I have eaten')
Du bist gekommen ('You have come', literally 'you are come.')
Sie sind gefallen ('They have fallen', literally 'they are fallen.')
Sie ist geschwommen ('She has swum', literally, 'she is swum.')
Du hast dich beeilt ('You have hurried', literally 'You have yourself hurried')
French
French has no present perfect aspect. However, it has a grammatical form that is constructed in the same way as is the present perfect in English, Spanish, and Portuguese by using a conjugated form of (usually) avoir 'to have' plus a past participle. The term passé composé (literally 'compound past') is the standard name for this form, which has perfective aspect rather than perfect aspect. The French simple past form, which also conveys perfective aspect, is analogous to the German simple past in that it has been largely displaced by the compound past and relegated to narrative usage.
In standard French, a verb that is used reflexively takes être ('to be') rather than avoir ('to have') as auxiliary in compound past tenses (passé composé, plus-que-parfait, passé antérieur, futur antérieur). In addition, a small set of about 20 non-reflexive verbs also use être as auxiliary (some students memorize these using the acrostic mnemonic DR & MRS VAN DER TRAMP).
J'ai mangé ('I have eaten')
Tu es venu(e) ('You have come', literally 'you are come.')
Nous sommes arrivé(e)s ('We have arrived', literally 'we are arrived.')
Vous vous êtes levé(e)(s) ('You have got up', reflexive verb, literally 'you have raised yourself/selves')
Spanish
The Spanish present perfect form conveys a true perfect aspect. Standard Spanish is like modern English in that haber is always the auxiliary regardless of the reflexive voice and regardless of the verb in question:
Yo he comido ('I have eaten')
Ellos han ido ('They have gone')
Él ha jugado ('He has played')
Spanish differs from French, German, and English in that its have word, haber, serves only as auxiliary in the modern language; it does not denote possession ('I have a car'), which is handled by the verb tener ('Tengo un coche').
In some forms of Spanish, such as the Rio Platense Spanish spoken in Argentina and Uruguay, the present perfect is rarely used: the simple past replaces it. In Castilian Spanish, however, the present perfect is normal when talking about events that occur "today".
For example, to refer to "this morning", in Spain one would say, [Yo] me he levantado tarde y [eso] no me ha dado tiempo de desayunar ('I have woken up late and it has given me not time to-eat-breakfast'), instead of [Yo] me levanté tarde y [eso] no me dio tiempo de desayunar ('I woke up late and it gave me not time to-eat-breakfast'). With no context, listeners from Spain would assume that the latter occurred yesterday or a long time ago. For the same reason, speakers of Castilian Spanish use the present perfect to talk about the immediate past (events having occurred only a few moments ago), such as ¿Qué has dicho? No te he oído rather than ¿Qué dijiste? No te oí. ('What did you say? I couldn't hear you.')
Portuguese
The Portuguese present perfect form conveys a true perfect aspect. Modern Portuguese differs from Spanish in that the auxiliary used is normally ter (Spanish tener) rather than haver (Spanish haber). Furthermore, the meaning of the present perfect is different from that in Spanish in that it implies an iterative aspect.[3]:pp. 80–81Eu tenho comido translates to 'I have been eating' rather than 'I have eaten'. (However, other tenses are still as in Spanish: eu tinha comido means 'I had eaten' in modern Portuguese, like Spanish yo había comido.)
The perfect aspect may be indicated lexically by using the simple past form of the verb, preceded by já ('already'): Eu já comi (lit.: 'I already ate') connotes 'I have already eaten'.
E.g.: Ele já foi, como sabem, duas vezes candidato ao Prémio Sakharov, que é atribuído anualmente por este Parlamento.
'He has, as you know, already been nominated twice for the Sakharov Prize, which this Parliament awards each year.'
Etymology
The word perfect in the tense name comes from a Latin root referring to completion, rather than to perfection in the sense of "having no flaws". (In fact this "flawless" sense of perfect evolved by extension from the former sense, because something being created is finished when it no longer has any flaws.) Perfect tenses are named thus because they refer to actions that are finished with respect to the present (or some other time under consideration); for example, "I have eaten all the bread" refers to an action which is, as of now, completed. However, as seen above, not all uses of present perfect constructions involve an idea of completion.
In the grammar of languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek, the form most closely corresponding to the English present perfect is known simply as the perfect. For more information see the article Perfect (grammar).
In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event. Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows.
A verb is a word that in syntax generally conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.
The preterite or preterit is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or the aorist. When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt even in perfective past meanings.
In linguistics, a participle is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, participle has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face".
The subjunctive is a grammatical mood, a feature of an utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude toward it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language. The subjunctive is one of the irrealis moods, which refer to what is not necessarily real. It is often contrasted with the indicative, a realis mood which principally indicates that something is a statement of fact.
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French aimera, meaning "will love", derived from the verb aimer ("love"). The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under consideration.
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang, went and washed. Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which uses auxiliary verbs as well as an imperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languages inflect the verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words meaning, for example, "yesterday" or "last week" to indicate that something took place in the past.
Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate to high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in Spanish conjugation.
The perfect tense or aspect is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is I have made dinner. Although this gives information about a prior action, the focus is likely to be on the present consequences of that action. The word perfect in this sense means "completed".
The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action or state in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
The perfective aspect, sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole, i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imperfective aspect, which presents an event as having internal structure. The term perfective should be distinguished from perfect.
The pluperfect, usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we had arrived" before the game began; "they had been writing" when the bell rang.
In French grammar, verbs are a part of speech. Each verb lexeme has a collection of finite and non-finite forms in its conjugation scheme.
The passé composé is a past tense in the modern French language. It is used to express an action that has been finished completely or incompletely at the time of speech, or at some time in the past. It originally corresponded in function to the English present perfect, but now there is a tendency to use it for all completed actions in the past as the equivalent of the simple past. Its current usage corresponds fairly closely to that of the Latin perfect tense. It is formed using an auxiliary verb and the past participle of a verb.
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as will have finished in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect, a grammatical aspect that views an event as prior and completed.
The conditional mood is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual.
Tense–aspect–mood or tense–modality–aspect is a group of grammatical categories that are important to understanding spoken or written content, and which are marked in different ways by different languages.
In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect, not to be confused with iterative aspect or frequentative aspect, specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily. As such, the habitual aspect provides structural information on the nature of the subject referent, "John smokes" being interpretable as "John is a smoker", "Enjoh habitually gets up early in the morning" as "Enjoh is an early bird". The habitual aspect is a type of imperfective aspect, which does not depict an event as a single entity viewed only as a whole but instead specifies something about its internal temporal structure.
Modern standard English has various verb forms, including:
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