Present time and past time

Students speaking other European languages sometimes misuse the present perfect tense in English because of interference from their mother tongue. The present perfect is often wrongly seen as an alternative to the past, so that a student might think that I’ve had lunch and I had lunch are interchangeable. It is also confused with the present, so that an idea like I’ve been here since February is wrongly expressed in the present with / am.

9 Verbs, verb tenses, imperatives

The present perfect always suggests a relationship between present time and past time. So I've had lunch (probably) implies that I did so very recently. However, if I say / had lunch, I also have to say or imply when: e.g. / had lunch an hour ago. Similarly, I've been here since February shows a connexion between past and present, whereas / am here can only relate to the present and cannot be followed by a phrase like since February.

In the present perfect tense, the time reference is sometimes undefined;often we are interested in present results,or in the way something that happened in the past affects the present situation. The present perfect can therefore be seen as a present tense which looks backwards into the past (just as the past perfect [> 9.29] is a past tense which looks backwards into an earlier past). Compare the simple past tense, where the time reference is definedbecause we are interested in past time or past results.The following pairs of sentences illustrate this difference between present time and past time:

/ haven't seen him this morning (i.e. up to the present time: it is

still morning)

/ didn't see him this morning (i e. the morning has now passed)

Have you ever flown in Concorde? (i e up to the present time) When did you fly in Concorde? (i.e. when, precisely, in the past)

9.24 Uses of the simple present perfect tense[compare > 10.13]

The present perfect is used in two ways in English:

1 To describe actions beginning in the past and continuing up to the present moment(and possibly into the future).

2 To refer to actions occurring or not occurring at an unspecified time in the pastwith some kind of connexion to the present.

These two uses are discussed in detail in the sections below.