ABSTRACT
Summary The language that English speakers use to express the timing of events looks relatively simple until we get into the details. In general, we distinguish various tenses, expressed on the verb denoting the action itself or by means of a helping verb (or a combination of these strategies) to capture timing. A number of difficulties arise when we start to look more seriously into how tenses are actually used by speakers of English. For example, it turns out that what we label the ‘present tense’ can sometimes be used to talk about the ‘here and now’ and sometimes about past events (Come 1989, the Berlin Wall falls) or even future events (I am due to give birth in March). The focus of this chapter is a particular construction which seems to raise a number of questions, from how it is used and whether it is even a tense at all, to how it came to be used this way, namely the present perfect.
