Thursday, 16 February 2012

About the use of tenses (5)

In my previous article here I have introduced some aspects about the use of the Present Perfect Tense.

This is a very common tense, both in dialogues and in written English, so do not be afraid to use it as much as you can. On the on the other hand, remember that this tense has a present connotation. So if you slightly suspect that the time frame of your sentence may be the present, you should use the Present Perfect Tense and not the Past Tense.

The trickiest issue about the Present Perfect Tense is that because we assimilate this tense with a past tense in Romanian, we tend to use the past instead of the present perfect. Do remember, use a past tense in English because you have a reason, meaning usually a time adverb, not because you have a past tense in Romanian.
  
Instead of saying:’’ This world was made for us.”, it is better to say:’’ This world has been made for us.”

The sentence was taken from a text, whose time frame is not the past, so it is not advisable to use a past tense. Also because we do not have in the sentence an adverb of time showing that the action took place in the past, we should not use a past tense.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you Iulia for your post.I've understood your message regarding the Present Perfect Tense.

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