Perfect (grammar)

Perfect (grammar)

In linguistics, the perfect (abbreviated PERF or PRF), occasionally called the retrospective (RET) to avoid confusion with the perfective aspect, is a combination of aspect and tense that calls a listener's attention to the consequences, at some time of perspective (time of reference), generated by a prior situation, rather than just to the situation itself. The time of perspective itself is given by the tense of the helping verb, and usually the tense and the aspect are combined into a single tense-aspect form: the present perfect, the past perfect (also known as the pluperfect), or the future perfect.

The perfect is distinct from the perfective, which marks a situation as a single event, without internal structure. A sentence in the perfective aspect cannot be in the perfect and vice versa (except in Modern Greek and Bulgarian).

The perfect can refer to events in the past that have been finished (such as “He has already eaten dinner”) as well as events that are ongoing (such as “He had been working on this novel for a year” or “He has composed operas for twenty years”); all are characterized by continued relevance to the speaker at the time of perspective.

The perfect contrasts with the prospective which encodes the present relevance or anticipation of a future event. While the perfect is a relatively uniform category cross-linguistically, its relation to the experiential and resultative aspects is complex — the latter two are not simply restricted cases of the perfect.