Re: "I just came back" vs. "I've just come back"

Peter Moylan wrote:

From: Peter Moylan <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: "I just came back" vs. "I've just come back"
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:07:13 +1100
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english

On 23/12/07 14:57, Django Cat wrote:

Incidentally, I'm not aware of any other language that makes this
[preterite versus present perfect] distinction. Many European
languages make past tenses with the subject + has + past participle
thing, but none of them contrast this with a simple past form with
each form carrying different meaning.

I'm not aware of any European language that does not make the
distinction. German does. Russian does. As far as I know most of the
Romance languages do. It's true that the distinction is disappearing
from spoken French,

It was never there...

but it's still there in written French.

'Aujourd'hui j'ai mangé' - 'I've eaten today'.
'Heir j'ai mangé' - 'I ate yesterday'.

It's a long time since I did 'A' level French, when we were taught that
the 'past historic' - 'heir je mangai' was only ever used in written
narrative, *never* in spoken language. In fact, here's the first
reference on Google:

http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~ra735/grammar/french/verbs/historic.html

I don't know any Russian. How does this work in German?


I can't
speak for other languages, but I'm reasonably certain that it's a
feature of essentially all Indo-European languages.

I'm reasonably certain it isn't.


I'll grant you that there are special cases that vary from language to
language, but the basic rule is simple enough: the present perfect is
a _present_ tense, in the sense that it's talking about a time span
from some (unusually unspecified) past time until *right now*. It
includes the instant at which the statement is made. The simple past,
on the other hand, never includes the present time.

That's certainly how it works in English, and concisely put. But I'd
like some examples of this distinction in *usage* existing in other
European languages, even where there may be a potential grammatical way
of forming both forms.



In my opinion the difference between BrE and AmE in this respect has
to do with a different mental model of the time periods implied by
qualifiers like "yet" and "just". In BrE both of those words imply an
interval that includes the present; in AmE the implied time interval
ended before the utterance that used those words.

Mmm hmm, and hence 'Did you eat yet'?


From time to time people ask on AUE what features of English foreign
learners find difficult; this distinction causes many learners
enormous difficulty.

Which learners?

Gordon Bennett, Peter, I've been teaching EFL on and off since 1982,
and much of my working week is spent correcting papers written by
second language English speakers from all over the world. It's a
distinction that *all* learners find especially problematic; French
speakers, German speakers, Arabic speakers, Chinese speakers, Russian
speakers.

I'll grant you that native speakers of Asian languages
have trouble with it, but that's because they're coming from languages
that don't have a tense system in the way we understand a tense
system.

Yabbut... that means that speakers of many of those languages are
completely shot away with the concept of *any* verb inflection
indicating time, anyway. That's largely the reason that about 90% of
Chinese students start every assignment with the word 'nowadays' - they
can't cope with the idea that you don't need to use vocabulary to
indicate time:

'Nowadays, globalisation is a big issue' - we *know* this is the
present, because that's an 'is' not a 'was' or a 'will be', but the
writer feels this needs to be reiterated by using 'nowadays'. This one
drives me completely bananas.

However, consider the speaker of a language that *does* actually do
something analogous to the present perfect in English - like German.
"Oh", thinks Hans from Hamburg, "this is a piece of cake, to make a
form of the past these people will understand you just do subect+verb
'have'+past participle - just like in German:

'Gestern habe ich aß'".

And what he comes out with (invariably) is

*'yesterday I have eaten'.

So, in fact, the chances are actually possibly greater of speakers of
European languages making this sort of error than folk from other parts.


DC, off to watch the Sponge Bob movie with a mince pie.
--

.

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