Please look at the following emphasized sentence taken from the news Curfew without end.
Neither of these — the government’s curfew and restrictions, or the protest programmes of the secessionist leadership — is new to Kashmir. We have seen them in 2008 and then again in 2010.
Shouldn't that part be like this?
We saw them in 2008 and then again in 2010.
Because 2008 and 2010 are over, we can't use present perfect here. Am I right?
Could the following be right?
We have seen them before, we saw them in 2008 and then again in 2010.
Is this the right way to use it?
Best Answer
The basic 'rule' is that a present perfect cannot be modified by a temporal expression which does not include the present (let's call this an NPT for 'non-present temporal'). Under this 'rule' you are quite correct in thinking that the sentence would be better expressed with a past:
There are, however, two situations in which an NPT is acceptable:
The one which is operative in your example is situations in which the temporal lies outside the clause syntactically, as a 'parenthetical' or supplement—something added to the clause. In these cases the supplement is conventionally 'bracketed off' with punctuation. Your sentence would be entirely acceptable if it were pointed this way:
The other is situations in which the NPT does not locate the prior action but expresses a circumstance which occurred at the same time as the prior action. Jim Reynolds raised an example in Chat last week:
Here when the trees were flowering really does not modify the entire present construction have visited, like this (for simplicity I've 'translated' it into declarative voice):
It is rather understood as modifying only the VP which is the complement of the perfect auxiliary 'have', like this:
In effect, it asks "Does visiting-Vermont-when-the-trees-were-flowering lie within your memory?"