For questions about the perfect, a construction generally formed in English with a form of "have" followed by a past participle. The English perfect may be classified either as a grammatical "aspect" or "tense".
The "perfect" in English is a grammatical construction generally composed of a form of the auxiliary "have" followed by the past participle form of a verb. The English perfect may be classified either as a grammatical "aspect" or "tense"; it does not fit perfectly into either of these categories.
The perfect in English can freely combine with the progressive aspect, the simple past tense, the will-future, or any of the other modal verbs like can or may.
There are special tags for the following combinations involving the perfect:
- past-perfect (simple past + perfect)
- conditional-perfect ("would", "should" or "could" + perfect)
- future-perfect ("will" + perfect)
The use of the present perfect is often more complicated than the use of the perfect in combined tenses, so there is a tag especially for the present perfect:
There is also a special tag for one common difficulty, deciding between the the simple past and the past perfect:
