In the old way of explaining tense, since people have been clinching on one-sentence basis (using one sentence and one tense in illustrating the use of a tense), they have long confused tense and sentence as one and the same. They can no longer separate action from time. Now as they see the time is a past, they reason the action must be also past:
Ex: He has worked there in the past three months
== However, this time, the action is not a past action.
Grammarians are deeply puzzled. Believe it or not, they hide the pattern of in the past three months
away from their books. The concealment has now become a must, as is pointed out in the following page:
== I call the pattern of in the past three months
the Past Family.
I have talked about these past time adverbials for decades, informing numerous readers and webmasters, and yet today there is still not a grammar book or web page that mentions about them.
As time goes by, grammarians further rationalize that, since they have hidden the pattern in the past three months
, and there is little objection from teachers and students, why don't they hide also since 2000
, and make a simple explanation of Present Perfect? They do, and call it Aspect Theory. In many web pages that talk about Aspect, you can't even find examples for the pattern of since 2000
== You search for the word 'since' in the pages and you know.
What has happened here? The patterns of in the past three months
and since 2000
are used with Present Perfect, rather than Simple Past. They play an important role in rendering Present Perfect. But they disappear when they should have been there. Now you may see what I mean when I say at the front page of my website that old grammars fail to explain the Present Perfect tense. Can we explain a tense by avoiding the difficult yet important part of the tense?
I am not really showing a difficulty here. On the contrary, if we put sentences and different tenses together, we will easily see a time sequence of past-perfect-present, with the Perfect Time
in between past and present. And the sole function of Present Perfect is to express the Perfect Time
. Therefore, if we will, we can replace huge difficulties and atrocious concealments with an absolute simplicity.
In my humble website, our new approach to the three tenses has arrived at a simplicity:
-- Simple Past expresses past time
-- Present Perfect expresses perfect time
-- Simple Present expresses present time
"One more word to it is a mistake" — this is my promise.
We can defend such simplicity because our new approach preaches that let the sentence be the sentence, and let the tense be the tense. Once the sentence-tense confusion has cleared up, the tense is a simplicity.