I. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
The Perfect Tense and the Perfect Continuous Tense are about connecting something earlier with something later. This relationship is expressed in two ways—Time and Cause/Effect.
1. Time
The perfect tense is used to talk about how long something happens. Or it can tell when a current action began. It can include everything in between. Here, the Perfect Tense connects a 'prior' (before) action the starting time of an action to a later marker of time or action.
2. Cause/Effect
The Perfect Tense also connects an earlier action, series of actions or an ongoing action to a later effect in a cause-effect relationship.
The English language has many ways to express a cause-and-effect relationship. At the beginning of the chapter on verb tenses, we looked at how the philosopher Aristotle was always dividing things up. He was interested in time and split time in two different kinds of time. However, he was also interested in cause-effect. He wanted to find the 'first cause' or the ultimate cause of many things in our universe. So, just like he split time into different types of time, he also split cause-effect into different kinds of cause-and-effect. Thus, it is no surprise that the English language has many ways to express the cause-and-effect relationship.
In English, you can, first, express the cause-effect relationship through adverb clauses. Then, conditional sentences are really about splitting the cause/effect relationship into different kinds of cause and effect. Finally, you can express cause-and-effect through using the perfect tense.
Exercise: Choose whether the sentences with the perfect tense are used for time or for cause and effect.
Put 't' for time and 'ce' for cause/effect. For some questions both answers may be correct. Nhập câu trả lời vào ô trống.
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