USING TENSES APPROPRIATELY

English for Today by Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose (Dr GAB)

USING TENSES APPROPRIATELY

Present Perfect Tense
The present perfect tense combines any of “has” or “have” with a verb in the past participle form such as “gone”, “done” et cetera. It performs the following functions:

1. It shows an action which happened in the past but has some relevance to the present time:
   Prof. Toyin Falola has raised some of the important issues facing Nigeria in his lecture at LASU.
2. It is used with “always” to show habitual actions:
   Nigeria has always been in debt.

Past perfect tense:
This tense is formed by the use of the auxiliary verb, “had”, and a verb in the past participle form. It is also called past-in-past. Primarily, it is used to refer to the first of two actions that both happened in the past. For instance, if you cooked last night and your husband also came home last night, you will express the first of the two past actions in past perfect tense:
I had cooked before my husband arrived.
This explains that of the two past actions, cooking happened before arriving.
Nnamdi Azikwe had become the Nigerian head of state before we gained independence.
GAB