Overview of All English Tenses - Present Tenses Overview - Present Perfect
The present perfect always relates the past to the present. This can be through the unfinished past, where we're expressing duration, such as 'I have played football for 10 years,' the indefinite past expressing experience in your life, such as 'I have been to Italy and Spain,' and also to show the present results of a past action 'I have broken my leg.' I broke it in the past and it remains broken in the present. Our final present tense is the present perfect continuous tense. Our example sentence here 'I have been playing football for 10 years' has the structure subject plus auxiliary verb 'have' or 'has' and then a second auxiliary verb here 'being' plus 'verb-ing'; 'I have been playing.' Very much like the present perfect tense, the present perfect continuous relates the past to the present but more focused on the continuity or the duration of the action. It can also be used to express the unfinished past, such as the example here 'I have been playing football for 10 years,' an action that began in the past and still continues in the present.
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