present perfect

Question

Ola,A: We have a new classmate, but she will only come next week.B: I saw her.B': I (already) have seen her (and can put a picture to her name).According to my understanding, B' emphasises more the idea that B' will recognize her the next time B' meets her.If B' narrows the timeframe of when B' saw her and still wants to emphasise that B' will recognise her the next time, next week, and says:"I have seen her before last week when the school started,"  I do not feel very comfortable with the choice of tense.Is my bad feeling ill-founded? I do not know about any grammatical rules that would decline to allow the usage of the present perfect in such circumstances.Thanks.

Yankee · Accepted Answer

Hi Anon

Anonymous"I have seen her before last week when the school started," I do not feel very comfortable with the choice of tense.

I don't feel comfortable with that either. The present perfect typically refers to a past activity that happened at an indefinite time in the past, or at some unspecified time between a point in the past and now. Generally speaking, you'll mainly find a specific past time in a present perfect or present perfect continuous sentence that uses "since", where the meaning basically is "between then and now":

- It has been raining since yesterday.
- I have lived here since last March.
- I have not seen her since last week.

The use of the simple past tense in your sentence does not mean that you won't recognize her.

Anonymous · Answer

Thanks Yankee for your answer. "Typically" and "mainly" Almost always but not always? [:^)]
One last question and please answer with a yes or no:

I have seen her before last week when the school started. -- Is this sentence ungrammatical?

[F][D]

[K]

Yankee · Answer

Your scenario suggests that people are talking about whether or not they have already seen "her" at one time in the past. You can make a very general statement and say either "I've already seen her" or "I've seen her before". Both of those sentences mean that the seeing happened at some unspecified point in time before now. That is a standard way to use the present perfect.

If you say "before last week" instead of just saying "before", that changes things in two ways:
1) It is no longer an indefinite reference to time up to now.
2) It states that the one time was prior to a specific time in the past.

In my book, that rules out the use of the present perfect in your sentence. I see your sentence not only as ungrammatical, but also as just plain awkward. The piling on of another reference to a specific past time ("when school started") simply tends to make the use of the present perfect more awkward.

That's how I see it.

Anonymous · Answer

Yankee"It is no longer an indefinite reference to time up to now." I have not seen her since he came out of the hospital.

Yankee"It states that the one time was prior to a specific time in the past." He has had several bad headaches since he has joined the army.

As I see it, the present perfect does not like to cooccur with adverbials that indicate a point in time or a period in the past, but since is one exception.

Yankee · Answer

I mentioned "since" in my first post, Anon. "Since" can be used with the present perfect, and especially the present perfect continuous, to state a starting point from which time is measured up to now.

However, what you quoted above (from my second post) refers specifically to the sentence the original poster asked about, and that sentence did not use the word "since". What you quoted above referred specifically to the difference between using just the word "before" and "before last week".

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