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English also has a present perfect continuous (or present perfect progressive) form, which combines present tense with both perfect aspect and continuous (progressive) aspect: "I have been eating". The action is not necessarily complete; and the same is true of certain uses of the basic present perfect when the verb expresses a state or a ...
The present perfect continuous (or present perfect progressive) construction combines some of this perfect progressive aspect with present tense. It is formed with the present tense of have (have or has), the past participle of be (been), and the present participle of the main verb and the ending -ing.
Other terms for the contrast lexical vs. grammatical include: situation vs. viewpoint and inner vs. outer. [10] [11] Lexical aspect, also known as Aktionsart, is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect.
Apart from what are called the simple present (write, writes) and simple past (wrote), there are also continuous (progressive) forms (am/is/are/was/were writing), perfect forms (have/has/had written, and the perfect continuous have/has/had been writing), future forms (will write, will be writing, will have written, will have been writing), and ...
Thus the present perfect is have written or has written, and the past perfect (pluperfect) is had written. The perfect can combine with the progressive aspect (see above) to produce the present perfect progressive (continuous) have/has been writing and the past perfect progressive (continuous) had been writing.
The present continuous tense has a very predictable conjugation pattern even for verbs that are typically irregular, such as essere ("to be") and avere ("to have"). For verbs with reduced infinitives, the gerund uses the same stem as the imperfect (which sometimes corresponds to the stem of the 1st person singular indicative present).
The perfect can also be combined with another aspect [21] that is marked in English – the progressive (or continuous) aspect. In perfect progressive (or perfect continuous) constructions, the perfect auxiliary (a form of have) is followed by the past participle been (from be, the auxiliary of the progressive aspect), which in turn is followed ...
The aorist participle represents the first event of a two-event sequence and the present participle represents an ongoing event at the time of another event. [25] Perfect verbs stood for past actions if the result is still present (e.g. 'I have found it') or for present states resulting from a past event (e.g. 'I remember').