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In a narrative, a succession of events is described. Most often, the events are cast in the past tense: - This happened. - Then this happened. - Then this happened. But they may also be cast in …

Perfect in this case has nothing to do with perfection. The name is an historical accident. The Latin perfectum means complete or finished, and one of the Latin past tenses was named perfectum becaus …

The notion of "present relevance" is useful for getting a first grip on the uses of the present perfect construction, but it's hardly definitive. (Presumably everything we say using any verb form or c …

Master is a telic verb: it signifies the change of state from non-mastery (or incomplete mastery) to mastery, in the same way that learn signifies the change of state from ignorance to knowledge. T …

Robusto's answer accounts quite clearly for Doyle's use, which reflects (I think tongue in cheek, but I could be wrong) the vices of contemporaneous journalism. Your own examples, however, do indeed …

There are two issues here: The particular verbs and verb phrases you use make discussion of perfectivity very complicated. Get may be used either as an inchoative or, in the phrase ‘have got’, to …

Conclude is an ergative verb: that is it, it may be used either transitively or intransitively, just like its synonym end: The concert ended/concluded prematurely, because of rain. (intransitive) …

That’s not a ‘past’ infinitive—infinitives have no tense—but a ‘perfect infinitive’. The difference a simple construction and a perfect expression is usually that the simple construction narrates the …

One common function of perfects is to shift your reference time. Once you've established the temporal relationship between the current RT and the prior event you're free to move into the prior timefr …

Native speakers, qua speakers, don’t think about it. But after forty-some-odd years of puzzling over just what the perfect construction ‘means’, grammarians appear to be moving toward a consensus whic …

Both of these are acceptable. Reference to a specific place is irrelevant. I suspect you are thinking of the ‘rule’ in formal English governing time reference with the present perfect. This is often …

The simple past is used to relate or narrate past eventualities. It makes no reference to the present. The present perfect, however, is not used to relate past events or states: it is a present tense …

What is often taught as a "rule", that present perfect cannot be used with a specific time, is only approximate. The present perfect is a present tense—it denotes a present state arising out of a past …

The present perfect designates a present state which has arisen out of the prior action; in the case at hand it's an existential or experiential perfect designating the "state" of the speaker's curren …

As far as it goes, your model is correct. What it depicts, in fact, is what many authorities regard as the historical origin of the perfect construction in utterances of the sort chasly from UK insta …