I’ve always struggled with the present perfect tense, as probably many non-native speakers do. The way I learnt the perfect tense in school always involved these so-called signal words that one had to remember, or these time-line diagrams that were meant to show that some event in the past was still relevant at present etc. But there were always cases that just didn’t fit into these pattern and this was driving me crazy.
Recently I came up with a trick how to understand the present tense. I have the feeling that it works very well for me, and makes it obvious whether or not to use the present perfect tense in an ad-hoc way without having to remember any signal words, rules or patterns.
I think it’s important to understand what a native speaker “feels” linguistically when he uses this or that construction, my idea seems to be based on this fact, and I wanted to ask native speakers among you if you feel it the way I think, or if it’s completely wrong. If the latter is true, do you think my method is appropriate to make sense of the present perfect tense?
My idea is to take the auxiliary word “have” more literally. When I use a similar construction in German, I don’t give the word “haben” (=have) any meaning in the sense of possessing something, it’s just a construction. I used to do it for the English “have” as well, and I think this is why I got confused.
Take for example “I have done my homework”. The way I look at it now is that I focus on the part “I have” – I have something, I possess something, and this is happening now. What do I have? I have my homework with the attribute “done”. It’s like having a mental checklist with the word “homework” on it, and with the status “done”, and I have it, because it’s on my checklist. The difference is in breaking up the sentence, namely not “I have done” + “my homework” but rather “I have” + “my homework done”.
Now using this rule I would not make the mistake and say something like “I have done my homework yesterday” (In German, for example, it would be perfectly OK to say the corresponding “Ich habe meine Hausaufgaben gestern gemacht.”!) I would not say it because if I focus on the “I have” part it becomes “I have yesterday”, but this does not make sense, you always have something now, and not at some point in the past, unless you say “I had done my homework yesterday”, which again makes sense, and you can proceed with applying the same logic but not to the present but to some given point in the past, and gives you the past perfect tense.
It seems that this rule is analogous to the signal words like “yesterday” that we had to remember, those are just words that indicate some point in the past and lead to a contradiction when used in a similar way as above: “I have (point in the past)”. So, really, instead of remembering the signal words it looks like it’s easier to just get rid of the participle part of the present perfect and see if the sentence still makes sense.
Also, now it’s more transparent in what way present perfect is a tense that bridges the past and the present, which those typical time-line diagrams try to illustrate. The construction consists of two parts, the auxiliary “have” + past participle. The past participle together with the corresponding object (e.g. “done homework”) is a property of this object which was obtained in the past. The auxiliary “have” tells you that that object still has this property now in the present.
To sum up:
- Thinking of the auxiliary “have” in the present perfect tense as just a formal part of the construction without any meaning on its own was a mistake
- Think of the “have” as really having something.
- This something is the corresponding object with the past participle indicating its present status.
It would be really helpful to hear opinions from both native and non-native speakers about weather or not this is helpful, useful, or correct at all.
Answer
As far as it goes, your model is correct. What it depicts, in fact, is what many authorities regard as the historical origin of the perfect construction in utterances of the sort chasly from UK instances:
I have my homework finished = I have my homework in a finished state
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The standard argument is that this sort of utterance became grammaticalized in very much the same way that the periphrastic modal have to/hafta was grammaticalized from utterances of this sort:
I still have my homework to do → I still have to do my homework
Do note that, as chasly from UK cogently points out, utterances of this sort are not restricted to the narrow sense "possession"; other senses of lexical HAVE may be involved. For instance
Now that we have that problem disposed of … to have a problem means that we are presented with the problem, not that we possess the problem
And your device of treating the two components of the construction—the HAVE form and the participle—as bearers of distinct sorts of information is to my mind a happy one for pedagogic purposes. (In fact, I have adopted it myself in my discussion of the Grammatical meaning of the construction over on ell.SE.) It is not strictly true—the ‘meaning’ of the construction derives from the collocation, not from the atomic meanings of its parts—but it does point up the peculiar character of the English perfect: it designates a state current at reference time which arises out of a prior eventuality. And it makes it very easy to explain the "present perfect puzzle"†: why the PrPf is not used with temporal expressions which do not include the present.
Where your model falls down is in failing to account for a number of uses to which the perfect construction has been extended since its origin in the dark backward and abysm of Old English. What you describe is the resultative or stative perfect; but there are also existential or experiential perfects ("I have often visited Paris") and continuative or universal perfects ("I have been living here since 1976"). I don’t think your model will accommodate these.
(The paper by James McCawley which introduced these distinctions in 1971 also offered a Hot News perfect—"I’ve just won the Nobel prize!"—but this is now regarded as a special instance of existential or resultative perfects, and McCawley himself withdrew the category in 1981.)
Grammarians have been arguing about just what the perfect "means" for forty-some-odd years now. In my opinion, the most useful recent treatment is that laid out by Atsuko Nishiyama and Jean-Pierre Koenig in a series of papers culminating in “What is a perfect state?”, Language 86, 3, 2010. Nishiyama and Koenig turn their attention to the pragmatics of the perfect and conclude that
the perfect is pragmatically, rather than semantically, ambiguous. The meaning of the perfect introduces a base eventuality and a perfect state whose category is underspecified semantically. Neo-Gricean reasoning leads the hearers to appropriately fill in the value of that variable.
An earlier version of their paper is available online here, but it’s formidably technical; I try to make its conclusions intelligible at §3.2 Pragmatic meaning of my post on perfects at ell.SE.
† Named by Wolfgang Klein in ‘The present perfect puzzle’, Language 68 (1992), 525–552. See also Anita Mittwoch, “The purported Present Perfect Puzzle”, in D. Gorland et al. (eds), Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs, 2014.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Stan , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
