The Present Perfect Again

Abstract

Most teachers will agree with Mr. Ralph H. Walker that simple present perfect and the present perfect continuous are for the non-native speaker of English two of the most troublesome tenses in the English verb system.1 As he says, It is an easy matter to teach a student to form the present perfect tenses, but quite another matter to teach him how to use them.... One often hears a non-native speaker use a simple present where he should use a simple present perfect... a present continuous where he should use a present perfect continuous . . . or a simple present perfect where he should use a simple past. The problem, in short, is to ensure selection of one of the present perfect forms when it is the only form of the verb that will do. Mr. Walker considers time to be the governing factor. The past tense refers to an event in time that has gone by: in his rather odd metaphor, the time frame is closed. Though he mentions only one past tense, he recognizes two present tenses, one indicating an action which occurs repeatedly and the other an action occurring With both of these the time frame is open. So is it with the present perfect tenses. The difference between them and the present tenses is that they refer to an action which has already occurred, but Instead of situating his action at a definite point in the past, the speaker places it within a period of time which extends from some point in the past up to now. Rather ashamed of this admission of self-determination by the speakerspeakers' intentions not being quite respectable since Bloomfield-Mr. Walker tries to identify tenses with time indicators inside the sentence. He shows that the present perfects have the same collocations as the present tenses. This establishes that they are not past tenses, and this is important, but its practical value is reduced by the number of expressions that will go with either present or past and by the fact that the utterance may contain no specific time indicators at all. The context is the only safe guide to the selection of a particular verb form. He does mention a few expressions peculiar to the present perfects and not compatible with present tenses. This is more helpful for teaching. But what he does not notice is that most of them are found also with past perfects. This confirms what should have been suspected from the pairs of past, present, and present perfect forms, that more than tense is involved.