Learn English – Have helped/helped in “Lots of people ____ us last year”

past-simplepresent-perfectverb usage

There are many confusing questions in Present Perfect vs. Past Simple debates, but one thing was always clear to me – if we refer to the past and use such phrases as "last week", "last year", etc. we just can't use Perfect. But I've just met this sentence in a PET grammar book:

Lots of people … (help) us last year and we want to thank everyone.

The only option for me was to use Past Simple there – "lots of people helped …", but according to the keys the right answer is "lots of people have helped us last year".

It's really confusing… Does it sound allright? My guess is there's some kind of context or meaning I can't see, but I'm really interested in how it could be explained. Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

Your grammar book is wrong: the present perfect is a present tense and is not used with temporal adjuncts which do not include the present. Last year without a preposition or a definite article designates the year before the current year, so it excludes the present, and you should not write

∗Lots of people have helped us last year.

It would however be OK to write this:

Lots of people have helped us since last year.

And the last year is the year-long timespan which runs right up to the present moment, so this would be OK:

Lots of people have helped us during the last year,

and this, omitting the preposition, would be natural in speech:

Lots of people have helped us the last year.

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