atw: Re: Particular past tense

Well, I can't resist such a specific appeal!

The "name of this tense" is obscured by some basic linguistic (grammatical)
issues: linguists (grammarians) distinguish between tense and aspect. Tense
is about past / present / future; aspect is (chiefly) about complete /
continuing. An interesting consequence of the separation of the two factors
is that we can use present tense to describe something that is now complete
but was done in the past. It's all a matter of focus.

The stuff that Peter quotes is essentially "present tense, perfect aspect";
the processes or activities are completed from the perspective of right now,
but they were carried out in the past.

OK: so what?

There seems to be a growing tendency -- not among journalists, who are
professional users of language (though they still manage to screw things up
to a remarkable extent), but among the people journalists talk to -- to
adopt present tense / perfect aspect when they could much more effectively
adopt the simple past: "The driver has lost control of his truck and he's
ended up in a creek" is much more appropriately expressed as "The driver
lost control of his truck and he ended up in a creek". I don't know why they
do it, but I suspect that it's related to the "sense of immediacy" that
Matilda Reich mentions. It's not a journalistic sense, but a sense derived
from the very close involvement of emergency people with the events of the
moment. They live in the present, because they are trying to control events;
anything in the past is clearly beyond control. I stress that it's just a
guess. To me, as a writer and editor as well as an academic grammarian, it's
plain weird . . .

Michael Lewis
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Brandle Pty Limited
Sydney, Australia
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