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Lev Landau Posted 13 years ago
Grammar
Present perfect + Even when + Simple past?
Hi everybody,
I want to ask if it is all right to use the structure: present perfect + even when + simple past in the following situation:
- He has never taken his watch off even when he went swimming. (The man in question has decided to never swim again)
Or must I use "goes swimming" instead?
I find this very confusing. Because he'll never swim again, I don't think it's correct to use the simple present after even when. But if the simple past is used, I think it will conflict with the present perfect in the first part of the sentence.
Please help me solve this problem.
Thank you very much.
I want to ask if it is all right to use the structure: present perfect + even when + simple past in the following situation:
- He has never taken his watch off even when he went swimming. (The man in question has decided to never swim again)
Or must I use "goes swimming" instead?
I find this very confusing. Because he'll never swim again, I don't think it's correct to use the simple present after even when. But if the simple past is used, I think it will conflict with the present perfect in the first part of the sentence.
Please help me solve this problem.
Thank you very much.
Top answer
" is not right grammatically. The problem is that the pres. perf.
- " is not right grammatically.
- The problem is that the pres.
- perf.
- " However, the context says that he has decided never to swim again, and in that context, the pres.
- /pres.
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2 Answers
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"He has never...went swimming." is not right grammatically. The problem is that the pres. perf. depicts continuous action in present time and so it should be matched with a present tense form: "He has never...goes swimming." If you want to use the past tense, then grammatically you'd pair it up with the past perf., which depicts continuous action in the past: "He had never...he went swimming."
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Lev LandauI want to ask if it is all right to use the structure: present perfect + even when + simple past in the following situation:I doubt that you will find sentences with this structure very often. They must be very rare if they exist at all. This is about the best you can do in combining those thoughts:
He has never taken his watch off, ev
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