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Tenses: Difference between revisions
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Confusion also arose with the perfect tense, technically called an ''aspect''. "He saw them in the kitchen" and "He has seen them in the kitchen" mean subtly different things. The past perfect served as a double past, but for constructions that ought logically to use a treble past, English grammar shrugged and breaks its own rules: 'She thinks he did it', and 'She thought he had done it' but 'She had thought he had done it'.
Another common tense issue is the progressive aspect. "Doing X, he did Y" meant that he did X and Y at the same time, not that he did X followed by Y. For the latter, you would say "Having done X, he did Y" if X and Y were related actions, or "He did X, then he did Y" if they aren't. This is described in the [[Turkey City Lexicon]] under [[Exactly What It Says
Related to this trope is [[Time Travel Tense Trouble]], where a conflict in the chronological order of history versus the order in which the character(s) or audience experienced it created confusion.
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