Learn English – Canonical Post #2: What is the perfect, and how should I use it

canonical-postperfect-constructionspresent-vs-perfect

This is a Canonical Post, intended as a reference and resource for both Questioners and Answerers.

The English “perfect” is deeply puzzling for learners. Nearly one Question in every twenty here asks about perfect constructions, and every Answer seems to raise new Questions. Even very advanced learners often misuse the perfect, or fail to use it when they should.

If it makes you feel better, the experts are baffled, too. Grammarians and linguists have been quarreling about the perfect for more than two hundred years. There are several large books on the subject, and important papers are published every year. It is only in the last ten years or so that a consensus has started to emerge.

Moreover use varies, especially in speech. Some uses are statistically more common in the UK than the US, and in many contexts speakers make no very clear distinction between, say, a present perfect and a simple past.

So there are no cut-and-dried rules you can always apply in every situation. The best I can offer is rules of thumb. These will work in nine cases out of ten—and nobody has yet figured out the rules for the tenth case! … I’ll mark these with this sign: ☛. Here’s the first one:

☛ Follow formal use of the perfect
This may appear to contradict what many of you have been taught, which is to keep your language colloquial and ‘everyday’. But with English perfects, formal use is everyday. The standard forms are used and understood everywhere, and will not mark your speech as pedantic or unnatural, even in very casual conversation. It will be simpler for you to learn just one pattern and use it all the time.

My rules of thumb will always reflect standard formal use. I will take little notice of colloquial use, except to point out non-standard (but colloquially acceptable) uses which might confuse you . With examples I’ll use a leading asterisk, ∗, to mark utterances which are regarded as non- or sub-standard in the formal register.

∗ I haven’t ate yet.

Because this is a very large topic, I’ve split it into separate Questions. Here are links to them, with the “Short Answer” rules of thumb for each:

  • 1. How do I construct a perfect?

    ☛ English perfects have two components: a form of the auxiliary verb HAVE on the left (the ‘HAVE’ piece), and a verbstring headed by a past participle (PA·PPL) on the right (the ‘VERB’) piece).

    This section includes a discussion of the most common errors learners make in constructing perfects.

  • 2. How do I recognize a perfect in context?

    ☛ A perfect construction is a form of HAVE followed by a past participle, with nothing coming between them but adverbs or adverbials.

    This section includes discussion of (2.1) syntactic factors which make recognizing a perfect construction difficult , (2.2) constructions which look like perfects but aren’t, and (2.3) constructions with modal verbs which employ the perfect construction in a non-perfect sense.

  • 3. What does the perfect mean?

    ☛ The perfect introduces a prior eventuality which in some sense constitutes a current state. But it is up to the hearer to infer the nature of that state.

    This is a long and complicated section, so I have divided it into two parts:

    • 3.1 grammatical meaning of the perfect, which is conferred by the construction itself

      ☛The VERB piece presents an eventuality located before the time which is being spoken about.

      ☛The HAVE piece presents a state which is current at the time which is being spoken about.

      ☛The perfect cannot be used to express narrative sequence.

    • 3.2 pragmatic meaning of the perfect, which is inferred by the hearer/reader from the context in which the construction is used.

      ☛ The ‘standard framework’ describes what the perfect means, distinguishing three meanings the perfect may express— continuative (“has been since…”), resultative (“has brought about …”) and existential (“been there, done that”).

      ☛ Recent studies look at how the perfect means and suggest that meaning is not expressed by perfect constructions but inferred by hearers/readers from both the prior eventuality introduced and the larger discourse context.

  • 4. When and how should I use the perfect?

    ☛ ”Don’t use the perfect unless you need it.”

    ☛ Use perfect constructions to introduce prior eventualities as context for the current discussion.

  • 5. ELL questions about the perfect

    This section links many ELL questions and answers which may address your immediate concern more directly. It is divided into questions about

    • constructing a perfect correctly
    • distinguishing perfect constructions
    • perfect tense
    • perfect aspect
    • modal, irrealis and conditional perfects
    • the kinds of perfect meaning
    • choosing between perfect constructions and simple present or past constructions
    • coordinating the use of perfect constructions with clauses using other verb constructions
    • the use of perfect constructions with time expressions

A note on notation

Occasionally the names of verb constructions will appear abbreviated, as follows:

[Notn.png]

These abbreviations may be combined, thus: PA·PF·PRG, meaning a ‘past perfect progressive construction’.

A word in uppercase italics, like HAVE, means ‘any appropriate form’ of the word, and the name of a word class (part of speech) in uppercase italics, like VERB or MODAL, means ‘any word of that class’. The superscript abbreviation XX of a verb form or construction after one of these means ‘the XX form of this word or word class’. For instance,

VERBPA·PPL means ‘the past participle form of whatever verb you are using’.

NEXT: 1. How do I construct a perfect?

Best Answer

2. How do I recognize a Perfect in context?

SHORT ANSWER:

☛ A perfect construction is a form of HAVE followed by a past participle, with nothing coming between them but adverbs or adverbials.

LONG ANSWER:
In theory perfect constructions should be easy to identify: they’re always marked by a form of HAVE followed by the participle of the next verb. But in actual use it’s not so easy.

2.1 Disguised perfects

First, there are constructions which make it difficult to detect a perfect construction:

  • Intrusions  Adverbs and negators may be placed between the HAVE form and the past participle which completes the construction:

    John has recently written the manufacturer about this problem.
    She had never seen such a beautiful sight.

    There may be several intruding adverbials:

    He has deliberately, maliciously and quite illegally denied my application.

    Intruding adverbial phrases may be v e r y   l o n g—and there’s no guarantee that writers will do you the courtesy of bracketing them in commas.

    He had without stopping to think whether there was any real likelihood that it would effect an actual improvement in his position spoken to Prof. Sartorius about his grade.

    That’s not good writing. But I’m afraid that a great deal of what you read is going to be not-good-writing. You will encounter this sort of thing frequently, so you need to watch out for it.

  • Questions  Ordinarily, only adverbials can intrude between the HAVE form and its past participle complement. But with questions, the HAVE form moves to the front, so the subject NP will intrude.

    Has Prof. Sartorius denied my application?

  • Omissions  Various sorts of ‘ellipsis’—omitting repeated words—may conceal the fact that the HAVE form applies to two or more past participles

    Question 811 (user John Isaiah Carmona)

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    Is it just me or it feels like “read and accepted” should be “read and accept” only, or is it already grammatically valid?

    Here the underlying have read and have accepted has been reduced to have read and accepted. That one’s fairly easy; but the affected past participles may be more widely separated, especially in very formal writing:

    The economy has neither completely recovered from the global recession which struck in 2008 nor remained permanently stuck in a protracted depression.

  • Adjectival participles  Note that in that last example there are also past participles which are not part of the perfect construction—stuck and protracted. These are employed as adjectives—stuck as an adjective complement and protracted as an attributive adjective. That’s something else you have to watch out for.

2.2 Sham perfects

Second, there are constructions which look like perfects but aren’t, because HAVE is being used with a past participle, not as an auxiliary but as a lexical verb.

  • Causative HAVE  In the first of these constructions, HAVE carries a causative sense: the Subject of the sentence causes something to happen. It is used with a subordinate clause in the passive voice from which the BE form has been deleted.

    Sam is having his house painted. = Sam is causing his house to be painted.

    Col. Sartorius had the mission carried out by Lt. Trench. = Col. Sartorius caused the mission to be carried out by Lt. Trench.

  • Resultative HAVE  In the second construction, HAVE is used approximately in the ordinary sense of “hold” or “possess”, and the past participle acts as an adjective modifying the preceding noun or noun phrase. The construction is called ‘resultative’ because the past participle describes the state of the noun which results from the action of its verb.

    We can’t act until we have this question settled. = ... until the question is before us in a settled state.

    Now that she has her kids graduated she has a lot more time to work with us. = … the kids are in a graduated state.

    Ordinarily it’s easy to distinguish these two constructions from perfect constructions: a noun phrase intrudes between the HAVE form and the past participle. But if the noun phrase is moved the difference is less obvious:

    Question 9604 (user Listenever)

    “I’ve come to bring Harry to his aunt and uncle. They’re the only family he has left now.” — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.

    OALD says leave somebody is to have family remaining after your death (OALD, leave #10). But the case’s subject is not Harry’s parents but Harry. Can Harry, who lived, be the subject of ‘leave’?

    User Listenever, perfectly reasonably, takes the underlying construction to be a perfect, he has left (some) family now. But what is actually going on is that the underlying construction is resultative: he has (some) family left now = he still has some family. This has been ‘transformed’ into a relative expression, leaving an ‘empty’ space between the HAVE form and the past participle: …family (which) he has ∅ left now.

  • HAVE got  As I mentioned earlier, the past participle of get in North American (US and Canadian) use is gotten, so HAVE got cannot be understood as a perfect construction there. It is simply a colloquial and somewhat more emphatic variant of HAVE.

    I’ve gotten four steaks for our dinner. = I have obtained four steaks for our dinner.
    I’ve got four steaks for our dinner. = I have four steaks for our dinner.

    But got is the ordinary past participle of get in other Englishes, and this can cause some confusion. HAVE got in the North American sense is spreading to those other speech communities, so if an Englishman or Australian says “I’ve got four steaks” he may mean either I have or I have obtained. You have to figure out what they mean from context.

    Note that HAVE got = HAVE is used only with HAVE in the simple present. With any other form or construction (had got, having got, to have got, MODAL + have got), HAVE got is a perfect

2.3 Modal perfects and sham perfects

Finally, there is the very quirky use of HAVE + past participle with modal verbs and in irrealis (‘unreal’) expressions.

The English ‘full modals’—can/could, may/might, shall/should, will/would—and irrealis expressions are (as you probably know) even more complicated than the perfect; so when these are combined with the perfect you have to expect especially difficult constructions. I haven’t got space here to go into all the details, but there’s one thing I have to warn you about: in these situations the HAVE + VERBPA·PPL construction is not always a perfect.

Sometimes it is. Will have VERBP A·PPL for instance, is the ordinary way of expressing future perfect, a future state grounded in prior eventualities. Likewise, may have VERB PA·PPL can be used to express the possibility of a present state grounded in prior eventualities.

Bob says John will have fixed the program by tomorrow. = Bob predicts that tomorrow we will be able to say ‘John has fixed the program’.

Bob thinks John may have fixed the program already. = Bob believes it is possible that John has fixed the program already.

The simple past forms of these auxiliaries, would and might, may be employed to express futurity and possibility in the past.

Last Wednesday Bob said John would have fixed the program by the next day. = Bob predicted last Wednesday that on Thursday we would be able to say ‘John has fixed the program’.

Last Wednesday Bob thought John might have fixed the program already. = Bob believed last Wednesday that it was possible that John had already fixed the program.

But there’s an ambiguity in those last two sentences. It arises because the simple past forms are also used to express irrealis mode—’unreality’—in the present.

If he hadIRREALIS the right software, John would fixIRREALIS the program right now.

If you want to express that in the past tense, you have a problem—you’ve already used up your past forms of these verbs! To get around this, the language employs the perfect construction as a ‘past marker’.

If he had hadIRREALIS the right software, John would have fixedIRREALIS the program right then.

In this case, had had and would have fixed look like perfects, but they aren’t interpreted as perfects. What they ‘mean’ is the ‘irrealis simple past’ of ‘irrealis simple present’ had and would fix.

NEXT: 3. What does the perfect mean? - 3.1 grammatical meaning of the perfect

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