Tenses (present perfect and past perfect)

By the end of this article, you should leave here with a grand understanding of the present perfect and past perfect areas of tenses, and an ability to easily tell both of them apart. 

Assumptions are bad, so let’s put first things first: what are tenses? In English grammar, a tense is a tool to indicate the time of an action by way of altering verb forms.

So, for instance, ‘am’ becomes ‘was’ when, ‘I am here’ is put in the past: ‘I was here.’ 

But we cannot rely on me—let us also examine a dictionary meaning. Wiktionary defines tense as ‘any of the forms of a verb which distinguish when an action or state of being occurs or exists.’

Both definitions signal that tenses are primarily verbs changing their forms, with the keyword there being VERB. How do we know this? No other parts of speech can change their forms to tell us about time. Whenever they defy this rule, they act as verbs. An example? ‘We were wowed.’

Parsing:

We (pronoun) 

Were (verb) 

Wowed (supposedly an interjection but now a verb) 

Note, however, that not all words can adapt this much. So, tenses are the various verb forms hinting us about time. 

Now, what are present perfect and past perfect tenses, and how are they different?

I like to challenge my students’ intelligence so much, as a way of evaluating if they truly understand what is being taught or if they simply ‘garbage in and garbage out’.

One day while teaching this topic, I asked them, ‘what is the opposite of present tense?’ ‘past tense,’ the response came. Although the answer is admittedly not fixed, I chose to move on to another question: ‘what is the opposite of present perfect?’ ‘Present imperfect,’ said a number of them and I couldn’t help but smile. 

This portrayed their understanding of tenses as being literal and basic. Hopefully, you know better, but to what extent? To the point of being able to discern between past and present perfect? Let’s see:

Identify the tense of each of the sentences below: 

1. I have been eating Semo for some time. 
2. She had been to the zoo twice. 

Do not proceed with the reading unless you have attempted the questions. 

Answers: the first¹ is present perfect continuous because ‘have’ indicates a state of existence, possession, or being (it either talks about the present or the past lingering into the present—it only shows completion or absolute past by introducing ‘had’), plus, the ‘ing’ verb ‘eating’ is continuous.

The second² sentence is a past perfect tense. Past because it uses ‘had (the past form of “has/have”)’ and ‘been (the perfect participle of ‘‘be’’)’, hence past perfect. 

If you got the test right before seeing my answers, then you already have a good background of the topic in question. 

Present Perfect vs. Past Perfect 

The present perfect tense shows that an action that STARTED in the past is consequential at the time of report. This is achieved by combining the present (has/have) with the perfect participle of a verb (e.g. come, sung) in a sentence. 

For example: I have already sung. 

On the other hand, the past perfect tense indicates that an action that took place in the past happened before another action in the past. 

Wiktionary defines this as, ‘a tense which describes actions that occurred before another action or event in the past.’ 

To me, this is like a way of reporting the present perfect tense, in the sense that ‘I have already sung’ becomes ‘I had already sung…’ If this is so, then knowing that ‘have/has’ is for the present perfect, while ‘had’ is for the past perfect, is key! 

Examples: 

S/N	Present Perfect Tense	Past Perfect Tense
1.	I have not been enamored even once.	Before we met, I had not been enamored even once.
2.	We have seen the Zuma rock.	We pledged not to turn back unless we had seen the Zuma rock.
3.	Azizat has hung her boots.
4.	Never have I come this far.
5.	They have been here.	It didn’t just disappear, they had been here.
6.	She has done her homework.	She had done her homework.
7.	Audrey has not visited the US yet.
8.	I have encountered all of them.
9.	They have educated us properly.	They had educated us properly, so we won the competition.
10.	Has she ever been here?	Had she ever been here before she wrote about us?

You may want to attempt numbers 3, 4, 7, and 8.

The major difference between both tenses lies in the use of ‘have/has’ and ‘had’ with one part referring to the present and the other to the past. 

Equally worthy of note is the fact that the present perfect shows the connection of an action with the present, while a past perfect focuses on an action that happened before another action in the past.