With that background, this is what I have been hearing (and yes, I use that grammatical structure advisedly) over the past weeks and months, particularly in, say, police interviews in news reports.
“We received a call at 9 in the morning and went to the house, and as we’re driving up the street we’re seeing an individual emerge from the house looking extremely disturbed. The man has waved a weapon in the air, at which point we’ve radio’d for backup…”
And so on and so forth.
So … is this just me? Am I seeing the start of a new trend? Is the past becoming obsolete? Or just the Simple Past?
That sounds more like a mix of the historical present, the past perfect, and the past perfect continuous, all in one sentence, to me. It’s a mess. It’s just bad grammar, or at least bad composition. I could be wrong about the tenses. I’m not a grammar expert by any stretch of the imagination.
The present perfect tense is doing fine, so far as I can tell. However, whenever I try to use the past perfect tense, my editors change it to the simple past.
First place, although I was taught that the tense is the present perfect, that is incorrect. Just call it the compound past, although the grammatically correct name would be imperfect since, as the OP points out, it is not usually used for completed action (which is what perfect means in the grammatical sense). The simple past is the perfective tense. These facts have not changed in my lifetime.
When a mathematician says that X has proved something, there is an implication first, that X is still alive and second, that it probably happened relatively recently and third, that it may not be widely known. But I think the simple past is still alive and well in English. The simple past is on life support in French and may be declining in German.
Keep in mind that perfect (as described in the OP) and continuous constructions are not tenses, but rather aspects, (not to be confused with perfect and imperfect verb tenses) and that aspect conveys a perspective with regard to some action. It also can be used for purely affective purposes (to express attitude, etc.), just as tense can. IOW, verb forms are not used purely as representations of linear time; they have psychological-functional-pragmatic purposes, too.
Mein Gott im Himmel, when did any of this start being important? In 1968 Herr Gellert, late Hitler Jugend, like our last Pope because he could play with a machine gun (can you blame him;) tried to force his victors’ kids to accept that they hadn’t won. On top of it, asshole was hitting on my GF. And I still wouldn’t care.
OTOH, I’m very fond of eldests samurai, Yoshi. Good kid, has wife’s blessing. I come from a line of managers where there is nothing more important than a staff you can trust. I trust Yoshi and Chris, but don’t tell Wife because she thinks it’s her idea.
As has been noted, the present perfect is much more common in German than the simple past.
Since English is a Germanic language, no doubt any shift away from the past tense and toward the present perfect in English is simply a matter of our language reclaiming its roots.
You’re not one of those people who recites an entire narrative in the past perfect, are you? They always seem to be the ones giving witness accounts to TV reporters.
“We had driven into the parking lot and I had gotten out of the car, and then the other guy had come up to us and had said…”
Enough background, for cryin’ out loud! Hurry up and get to the past!
