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)

  By purchasing this product, you certify that you have read and accepted the Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions...

  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 + VERB^P_A·P_PL construction is not always a perfect.

Sometimes it is. Will have VERB^{P _A·P_PL} for instance, is the ordinary way of expressing future perfect, a future state grounded in prior eventualities. Likewise, may have VERB ^P_A·P_PL 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 had_IRREALIS the right software, John would fix_IRREALIS 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 had_IRREALIS the right software, John would have fixed_IRREALIS 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

Both sentences, "He asked for my phone number" and "He has asked for my phone number", are grammatically valid sentences that make perfect sense in context.

The first is simple past: action happening at a specific time in the past. The second is past perfect: action happening at an unspecified time in the past. In this context, there isn't much difference: At some time in the past, he asked for her phone number. Simple past CAN be used with a specific time, like "Yesterday he asked for my phone number." You can't use a specific time with past perfect. It's often used to distinguish an unspecified time from a specific time. Like, "Did he ask you yesterday?" "No, but he has asked me."