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The auxiliary of the perfect have introduces the perfect aspect into a sentence and is followed by the PPART form of the verb. If it co-occurs with other auxiliaries, it follows the modal but precedes the progressive and passive auxiliaries.

Have has three different contracted forms: in present tense ’s (for has) and ’ve (for have) and in the past ’d (for had). As with the contracted forms of the modals, these are attached to the subject, mainly when the subject is a pronoun. However, since the bare infinitive form of have is also have, ’ve can also attach to modals which can precede have, as in You could’ve done it. It is even possible to get more than one of the auxiliaries contracted in a string: I’ll’ve done it.

Let us now look at some examples of the use of the auxiliary of the perfect:

‘The Simpsons’ has delivered hip irreverence and clever satire for more than ten years now. (N#279:8)

It was puerile, silly and immature – and everyone who saw it thought it was a work of side-splitting wonder. The cult of ‘South Park’ had been born.

(AUS#51:23)

By this time next year they will have become a ratings goldmine. [adapted]

In all three sentences, we have the auxiliary of the perfect, have, followed by a verb in its PPART form, delivered, been and become, respectively. In the first one, have occurs in the present tense, in the second in past tense and in the third it is preceded by the modal will, and the adverbial by this time next year indicates that the modal refers to future here. (Note that in the last sentences, have itself occurs in its bare infinitive form since it is part of the complement of will, and as we know, the modals take a bare infinitive as their complement.) So, there are definite differences in tense here, but given that the perfect auxiliary occurs in all of them, we would also expect the three sentences to have something in common.

Often people confuse perfect aspect with past tense because the perfect aspect tends to be used to refer to events that took place in the past, but as we now know, we need to distinguish between time and tense. We find that the easiest way to disentangle this is to use a rather clever system intro-duced by a philosopher called Reichenbach in 1948. We can think of three points of time that are relevant to a normal statement (or question for that matter): the time the statement was spoken or written, S for ‘speech time’;

the time on which we focus, R (Reichenbach called this reference time, hence the R); and the time at which the event took place, E for ‘event time’.

These points are then put on a time line, where time is seen as stretching from the past into the future. Which tense and aspect are used depends on the relation between S, R and E. Let’s consider the three examples above in the light of this. In ‘The Simpsons’ has delivered hip irreverence and clever satire for more than ten years now, the adverbial now indicates that we are

143 focusing on the present; hence speech time, S, and the time on which we focus, R, coincide. The event of delivering hip irreverence and clever satire started ten years ago and continues until now. We can draw the following diagram for the first sentence:

Since this article was written in 1998, the ‘speech’ time is 1998, and now indicating the focus time, is then also 1998. The event started 10 years earlier, and the dotted line indicates that it carries on into the present of the statement. The years are actually not important; what matters is the relation between S, R and E.

Turning now to The cult of ‘South Park’ had been born, the time of focus is in the past; there was a time in the past at which the birth of the cult had taken place. We know it is past, because the sentence preceding it sets the scene: It was puerile, silly and immature – and everyone who saw it thought it was a work of side-splitting wonder indicates that we are focusing on the past.

At the time when people saw it, the cult had already been born, otherwise the simple past would have been used: The cult of ‘South Park’ was born. We can then draw the following diagram:

Here we haven’t given any indication of the years, since that information is not known. What we do know is that there is a ‘now’, S, the time at which the statement is made, and that at some time prior to that there were some people who saw South Park and liked it, that’s the time on which the state-ment focuses, R, and that some time prior to that the cult of South Park was born, that is the event the statement talks about, E.

Turning now to the final sentence, By this time next year they will have become a ratings goldmine, here we are focusing on some time in the future, this time next year in fact. At that time, they will have become a ratings gold mine. Presumably, one would say this only if ‘they’ had not already become a ratings gold mine, so that this will take place sometime between now and this time next year. We can then draw another diagram:

Between S (now) and R, there is a year, and some time between those two points the event of becoming a ratings gold mine happens.

In these examples, we can see that what the sentences have in common is the fact that E precedes R, i.e. that the event happened (or started hap-pening) before the time we are focusing on. This is why it is easily confused with past tense; past tense usually refers to an event that happened in the

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past, i.e. before now. The confusion is then between ‘before the time we are focusing on’ and ‘before now’. However, as we see in the last example, the event itself can be in the future as long as it is before the focus point.

Perfect aspect is then a way of indicating the relation between the focus point and the time at which the event took place. Tense, on the other hand, is a way of indicating the relation between focus time and speech time; in the first sentence, focus time and speech time coincide (hence the use of now) and we get present tense. In the second one, focus time pre-cedes the speech time and hence we get past tense (since the event time also precedes the focus time, we also get perfect aspect). When the focus time is in the future, i.e. after S, we get some indication of future; in the third sentence this is will (though remember that there are reasons not to refer to this as the future tense).

Just for comparison, let’s look now in the same way at some sentences without the perfect aspect. We can use the following adapted sentences:

Now ‘South Park’ makes a lot of money for the company.

Back in 1998 ‘South Park’ made a lot of money for the company.

For the first of these sentences, the focus time is now, and the event time is also now, hence we get the following diagram:

In the second sentence, we are focusing on a time in the past (that is, past from the time of the utterance), a time at which the event took place.

We can sum up the relation between tense and perfect aspect, then, as follows: when the event time precedes the focus time, perfect aspect is used; when the two coincide we do not get perfect aspect. When the event time precedes the speech time we get past tense, and when they coincide we get present tense (often with progressive aspect in English). When the event time follows the point of speech in time, then we get some future indication.

For an event that happened in the past, if we use perfect aspect, we are focusing not on the time of the event, but on some later time, for instance

‘now’. Hence perfect aspect can be used when we want to indicate the importance of an event for what is going on now. This is often referred to as the ‘current relevance’ use of the perfect. It can also be used to express

‘hot news’, for instance in headlines or advertisements. The following

145 example is the headline announcing the South Park article that appears later in the magazine.

UNCENSORED CARDBOARD. A show that stars foul-mouthed cardboard cut-outs has become a cult hit for SBS. (AUS#51:23)