Thanks to Bob Haussamen for pointing out that the present perfect
tense/aspect does not in all cases designate an action that is over and
done with, and no longer under way.  I should have realized that this
introduces a complication in my claim.

I was not referring to 'perfect tense', however. I was referring to the
past participle form of the verb -- often called the '-en' form"
'eaten', 'broken', 'walked', 'come'. This is the single word that is
half of the present perfect, the auxiliary 'have' being the other half.
The past participle also occurs in other tenses/aspects/voices, e.g.,
past perfect, future perfect, passive. I'm sorry if this wasn't clear
from my original post.

When this verb form appears, it does designate an action that is
conceptualized as having gone through at least one full cycle of
beginning, being under way, and achieving whatever final state the
meaning of the verb entails (the final state of 'love', for instance,
does not include ceasing to love; it is being in the state of loving
someone). This is as true of future perfects ('we will have eaten') and
hypotheticals ('if we had eaten') as it is of present and past perfect
verb phrases.

This is true of the present perfect, even when it has current relevance.
A sentence like 'He has loved her for ten years' can be paraphrased with
'He achieved the state of loving her and has been in that state for ten
years, and might well continue to be in that state for the indefinite
future'. Similarly, 'We have eaten at that restaurant on every one of
our twelve anniversaries' entails that 'we' went through at least one
full cycle of eating at the restaurant.

The meaning element of continuation that is sometimes part of the
present perfect is conveyed by the construction as a whole, not by the
participle alone. Constructions have to be treated as wholes that are
not necessarily the sum of their parts. Multi-word constructions may
take on nuances of meaning beyond those that their parts add up to.
Present perfect is a very challenging problem for linguists -- QUIGLS**
gives three variants of meaning for it, some with subvariants, and I
know of a dissertation that analyzes seven different meaning variations.

We also need to be aware of what kinds of meanings are present thanks to
adverbial phrases. 'He loved her' does not entirely rule out the
possibility that he loves her now ('he loved her then, and he loves her
now'). 'He loved her _for ten years_' puts a time boundary around the
state of loving that strongly suggests he stopped loving her at the end
of that time period. Those boundaries are supplied by the adverbial, not
by the verb. 'He has loved her' alone is ambiguous as to whether he
still loves her, while 'he has loved her for ten years' strongly
suggests (if it doesn't absolutely entail) that he does still love her.
'He has loved her' is not ambiguous on the point that he achieved the
state of loving her, however.

I need some clarification on this:

"Our false definition of the perfect tense is, I think, a serious flaw in
conventional grammar.  Blame William Lily, who in 1510 translated the Latin
perfect tense (which does show completed action) with have.  HIs grammar
book was so influential with English royalty and English education that we
are still stuck with his mistake.  He should have translated the Latin
perfect with the English plain past but grammarians at the time got their
heads pretty turned around trying to match English to Latin grammar.
Clearly, to me at least, 'He has loved her' can mean either that he still
does or that he recently stopped, depending on the context; but 'He loved
her' is unambiguous--it's over."

I'm not sure what Bob means here. Does the use of present and past
perfect tense/aspect in English have much to do with how Latin was
translated? Perfect tense/aspects began to emerge in Middle English and
were highly developed by the 1600s (according to C. M. Millward's 'A
Biography of the English Language'). Their range of meanings continued
to develop up to the present time. I'm more concerned with how
present-day speakers and writers of English use perfect tense/aspects
than with how the construction has been defined in traditional grammar.

I'm uncomfortable with a label such as 'perfect tense'. The present
perfect tense/aspect construction is not a perfect tense. The label I am
familiar with for this construction (from linguistics) is 'present
perfect tense/aspect'. (Some linguists use 'perfective' rather than
'perfect'.) Leaving 'aspect' out is a serious omission; the reason
English has the construction is to mark aspect in addition to tense.

**QUIGLS = Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik 'A Comprehensive Grammar
of the English Language'.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-259
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
                                       **
"Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose,
but that's not why people do it normally"  -            Frank  Oppenheimer
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