In the English language, we generally mark occurrences
through time with the simple past tense, the present tense, and the future
tense. However, these simple tenses prove inadequate for capturing the idea
that an act or occurrence has been completed or not, that it continues or has
stopped, or that it has become a done thing. The English language takes
recourse to the so-called perfect tenses to describe an action, occurrence, or
circumstance more fully as it has unfolded or is unfolding in the time
continuum.
The series of five essays below, written for my weekly
column in The Manila Times though the
month of December 2015, makes a full-dress review of the perfect tenses. The
first essay was in reply to a question raised by Forum member Miss Mae about a certain
doubtful usage of tense, and the four subsequent essays sought to clarify and
render with greater precision the four tentative conclusions about the perfect
tenses that she presented after reading that first essay.
1 – What a sentence needs to
take a true perfect tense
This intriguing grammar question
was posted recently in Jose Carillo’s English Forum by member Miss Mae:
“Sir, in the sentence below from an
article in the Humanity in Action website, why is there no ‘had’ before the
verb ‘developed’?
“‘The communist legacy of isolation
and the consequent stereotypes that developed
also exerted a huge influence on the self-perception of people with
disabilities.’”
My reply to Miss Mae:
It’s clear from your question that
you considered that sentence to be in the past perfect tense, so it should have
used the verb form “had developed” instead of “developed” to read as follows:
“The communist legacy of isolation and the consequent stereotypes that had developed also exerted a huge
influence on the self-perception of people with disabilities.”
Using the past perfect form “had
developed” in that sentence is incorrect, however. This is because the sentence
you quoted isn’t in the present perfect but in the simple past tense. The long
noun phrase “the communist legacy of isolation and the consequent stereotypes
that developed” is its subject, “also exerted” is the operative verb, and the
noun phrase “a huge influence on the self-perception of people with
disabilities” is the sentence complement.
Indeed, in that sentence, the word
“developed” isn’t functioning as a verb. Together with the conjunction “that,”
it forms the descriptor “that developed” to modify the subject, “the communist
legacy of isolation and the consequent stereotypes.” That descriptor—it doesn’t
use the auxiliary verb “has” or “have” or “had”—simply reports that the
development took place without indicating whether it has ended, is ending, or
will end sometime in the future.
So when would “had” be needed to
work with “developed” in a sentence? It’s when we need to use the true perfect tenses to indicate the
completion or “perfection” of that development in relation to a particular
event or point in time.
We use the past perfect tense (had + past participle of the verb) when that
development was completed with respect to another action or event in the past,
as in “The communist legacy of isolation had
developed before the country could institute democratic reforms.”
We use the present perfect tense (have + past participle of the verb) when
that development is completed with respect to the present, but precisely when
isn’t specified: “The communist legacy of isolation has developed because of the weakness of the country’s democratic
institutions.”
And we use the future perfect tense (will have + past participle of the verb) when
that development will be completed with respect to another future action or
event: “The communist legacy of isolation will
have developed by the time the country’s dictatorship decides to stop its
brutal expansionist tendencies.”
Part 2 - A full-dress review of the perfect tenses
Last week, I discussed why the verb
form “developed” rather than “had developed” is the correct usage in this
sentence: “The communist legacy of isolation and the consequent stereotypes
that developed also exerted a huge
influence on the self-perception of people with disabilities.” This was in
reply to a question by Miss Mae, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, who
thought that that sentence is in the perfect tense and should have used the
form “had developed” instead.
On the contrary, I explained, the
sentence she quoted isn’t in the perfect tense but in the simple past tense. I
then briefly sketched how the perfect tenses work to indicate the completion or
“perfection” of an action in relation to a particular event or point in time.
My explanation drew this rejoinder
from Miss Mae:
“I couldn’t help but feel that I
now understand the perfect tenses better. But am I really right? These are what
I have concluded from your grammatical prescriptions: (1) Use the past perfect
tense when the action was completed before another action, (2) Use the present
perfect tense when it is unknown when the action was completed, and (3) Use the
future perfect tense when the action still has to be completed in the future.”
My reply to Miss Mae’s rejoinder:
I’m glad that my column last week
enhanced your knowledge of what the perfect tense is, but I’m afraid that your
three conclusions about its usage are rather fragmentary and even misleading.
Evidently, my quick review of the perfect tense in last week’s column has not
been comprehensive enough, so I will now make a full-dress review of that
admittedly very challenging grammatical form. I’ll do it more slowly and in
more detail this time to make sure that their mechanisms and uses are clearly
understood.
In English, the perfect tense is a verb form that
indicates that an action or circumstance occurred before another event or point
in time, and focuses attention on the outcome of that occurrence rather than on
that occurrence itself. This tense has three basic forms: the present perfect, the past
perfect, and the future perfect.
Grammatically, all three of them use a form of the auxiliary “have” together
with the past participle of the verb, but the third (the future perfect) also
adds the auxiliary “will” to indicate futurity of the action involved.
Take a look at this present-perfect
sentence, for instance: “The lovers have
prepared for their wedding.” The focus in this sentence is on the present
outcome of the lovers’ preparation, which is the fact that they are now ready
to be wed. This is in contrast to the sense of the present-tense sentence “The
lovers prepared for their wedding,”
which focuses instead on their action of preparing for that wedding. (Give
yourself a few moments to understand and internalize that distinction in your
mind.)
Before getting down to the nitty-gritty
of the perfect tenses, however, we need to take up two major sources of
confusion about them. The first is the use of the word “perfect” in the term
“present perfect,” and the second is the use of the term “past particle” for
the form that the main verb takes in the perfect tense.
The word “perfect” in “present perfect” strongly implies
“being flawless or exact in every detail,” but its intended sense is actually
that of a “perfected” or “completed” action at a certain point of time. As to
the term “past participle,” it really has nothing to do with the past tense. It
just so happens that a verb’s past participle is often exactly the same as its
past-tense form; indeed, many grammarians consider “past participle” a misnomer
and suggest calling it “perfect participle” instead.
Part 3 – The present perfect tense
In a rejoinder to my column that
made a quick review of the perfect tenses (“What
a sentence needs to take a true perfect tense,” December 5), Miss Mae, a
member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, made three conclusions about their
usage that were rather fragmentary. I therefore started a full-dress review of
the perfect tenses last week, emphasizing that they (a) indicate that an action
or circumstance occurred before another event or point in time, and (b) focus
attention on the outcome of that occurrence rather than on that occurrence
itself.
One of Miss Mae’s slippery
conclusions was that the present perfect tense is used “when it is unknown when
the action was completed.” To put that conclusion in the proper perspective,
let’s now take up the specific uses and workings of the present perfect.
Conceptually, the present perfect tense is used to refer to
an event that occurred in an unspecified time in the past, in which the action
has been completed but the time period is not or is of indefinite duration. The
present perfect therefore cannot be used to refer to a specific past time—only
to an unspecified or indefinite one.
Thus, it is incorrect to construct sentences like “The
war-torn country has taken stringent
austerity measures a year ago” or
“Two feuding presidential candidates have
debased Philippine politics severely last
week.” The time frames of “a year
ago” and “last week” being both specific and definite, they fail to satisfy the
requirement of the present perfect.
In those two sentences, the present perfect will work only
if “a year ago” and “last week” are dropped: “The war-torn country has taken stringent austerity measures.”
“Two feuding presidential candidates have
debased Philippine politics severely.” The first sentence is now silent
about exactly when the country took austerity measures, and the other about
exactly when the two candidates debased Philippine politics.
The present perfect works in at least six specific ways to
define events and occurrences as they unfold in time, as follows:
(a) To express a state or condition that began in the past
and leads up to and including the present: “Congress has stalled on the Bangsamoro bill for months.” “The detained
murder suspect has remained silent
for days.” “The defenders have kept
their resistance for years.”
(b) To express habitual or continued action: “She has worn high heels since eighteen.” “He
has flouted conventions all through college.” “They have sworn to crush infidels even at the
cost of their lives.”
(c) To indicate events occurring at an indefinite time in
the past (used with the adverbs “ever,” “never,” and “before”): “Have you ever been to Geneva?” “Some women have never gone out of their own villages.” “He denies that he has courted that starlet before.”
(d) To indicate that an action happened only recently (used
in tandem with the adverb “just”): “The boy has
just finished eating breakfast.” “We have
just watched a real shouting match on TV.”
(e) To indicate that an action happened more than once, but it’s not
important or necessary to know exactly when: “I have toured Europe four times.”
“He has rewritten his unpublished
novel 15 times.”
(f) To indicate that something that happened in the past
still continues to influence the present: “She has contemplated on having a new hairdo every day this week.”
“Traffic jams have brought the city
to a standstill, so the city council has
intensified its search for better ways of dealing with the problem.”
The present perfect gives us the power to better comprehend
the conditions of the moment by marking them in relation to things that took
place before, thus intensifying our perception of time as well as the reality
of occurrences and events.
Part 4 – The past perfect tense
Let’s continue our full-dress
review of the perfect tenses, this time focusing on the past perfect tense. We
will do so to clarify the second of three slippery conclusions about the perfect
tenses that were presented by Miss Mae, a member of Jose Carillo’s English
Forum, in her rejoinder to my column last December 5. Her second conclusion was
that the past perfect tense is used “when the action was completed before
another action.”
That the past perfect tense is used
for an action that was completed before another action is, of course, basically
correct, as in “She had left to work
in Dubai when her job application for a coveted Manila-based job was accepted.” This is just one of the
uses of the past perfect, however. Another use is for a continuing condition
that ended in the past with usually only an implicit reference to another past
outcome, as in “The dead felon had taken
the wrong path.”
Grammatically, the past perfect is
formed in much the same way as the present perfect, with one major difference.
We use the past participle of the main verb in the same way as the present
perfect, but this time we pair it off with “had,” the past tense of “have,” to
form the past perfect component, which we then pair off with at least one other
action in the simple past tense. The typical past-perfect sentence thus
consists of at least two separate actions, one in the past perfect and the
other in the simple past.
The past perfect,
unlike the present perfect, doesn’t cover actions that may extend to the
present. Instead, it emphasizes the fact that one action, event, or condition
ended before another past action, event, or condition began, as in “The couple had left for the airport when their
daughter called that her flight was
cancelled.” The past participle is carried by the action of the couple, “had left for the airport,” which took
place before the daughter’s action of making a call about the cancellation of
her flight.
In practice, the
past perfect is most useful in showing the hierarchy or succession of past
actions in compound or complex sentences. In particular, if the action in a
coordinate clause happened before the action in the other coordinate clause, the
past perfect becomes the appropriate tense for the dependent clause. Take this
compound sentence, for example: “The applicant reported for the job interview promptly at 10:30 a.m., but the
hiring officer had left for an
emergency manager’s meeting.” The action in the second clause, “the hiring
officer had left for an emergency
manager’s meeting,” has to be in the past perfect because it took place before
that of the first clause, which is the applicant’s reporting for the interview.
In complex
past-perfect sentences, the independent clause takes the simple past tense.
Consider this sentence: “The poll body disqualified
the candidate because, among others, she had
made material misrepresentations in her certificate of candidacy.” Both the
action in the independent clause, “the poll body disqualified the candidate,” and in the dependent clause, “she had made material misrepresentations in
her certificate of candidacy,” happened in the past, but the latter takes the
past perfect because it precedes the former in time.
Then there is a baseline use of the past perfect that
doesn’t require the explicit use of another action completed before another
past event. Take a look at this sentence: “The heavy rains had lasted a month.” It states an action that began and ended
sometime in the past, as opposed to the present perfect “The heavy rains have lasted a month,” which denotes a
condition that began in the past and continues up to the present.
Part 5 – The future perfect tense
To complete our full-dress review of
the perfect tenses, we will now take up the future perfect tense. We will do so
to correct the third faulty conclusion about this tense that was presented by Miss Mae, a member of Jose Carillo’s English
Forum, in her rejoinder to my column last December 5. Her understanding was
that the future perfect is used “when the action still has to be completed in
the future.”
This description of the future
perfect misses out on this crucial aspect: the completion of the future action or
event should be with respect to another future action or point in time. To get
a better sense of this, imagine that we have travelled in time and are now
looking back at actions or events that will be completed after the present time
(the here and now). Indeed, the future perfect will be a kind of present tense
from the viewpoint of the future instead of the present.
The future perfect sentence has
this general form: (Subject) + (“will
have”) + (past participle of main verb) + (time relation to another future
action, expressed in the present tense). Consider this example: “The woman will have cooked dinner when her friends
arrive.” The sentence describes an
action that continues into the future—the future perfect component—and another
action or point in time, expressed in the simple present, in which the action
culminates.
Specifically, the future perfect tense can be used for these
four distinct scenarios:
1. A future action that will be completed before another future
time or event: “The Supreme Court will have decided the candidate’s
disqualification case by then.” (The
act of deciding the case is done before some unspecified time in the future.)
“By the time his wife comes back from
her morning jog, he will have finished
writing his report.” (The wife’s coming back takes place after the writer
finishes his report.)
2. An action or condition that will continue up to a certain
point in the future: “The executive will have held the job for 20 years when
he retires in June.” “The astronaut will have been in the Space Station for
a year by the time he goes back to
Earth.” (In both sentences, an existing condition remains unchanged until a
specific future time.)
3. A future event that will occur before a specific time or
action in the future: “When yearend comes, the family will have moved to their new house.” “By the time the disqualification case
against her gets decided, the
candidate will have tangled with
every convention and established authority.” (The independent clauses “the
family will have moved to their new house” and “the candidate will have tangled
with every convention and established authority” take place prior to the time
frames of their respective dependent clauses.)
4. A future event whose completion is more important than
how long it will take to complete it: “By
the time he gets paroled, the
convict will have stayed in prison
for 10 years.” “At this rate, he will
have taken the bar examinations six times by the time he obtains
his license to practice law.” (The future perfect dramatizes the importance of
the end-point of a process rather than the process itself.)
Keep in mind that in future perfect sentences, the
independent clause cannot begin with the conjunctions “when,” “while,”
“before,” “after,” “by the time,” “as soon as,” “if,” and “unless.” Only the
dependent clause can use them. Thus, this future perfect construction is
incorrect: “Anita leaves for Dubai
next week when she will have obtained
her work visa.” The correct construction: “When Anita leaves for Dubai next week, she will
have obtained her work visa.”
This ends our four-part full-dress review of the perfect
tenses.
