LifeDeath wrote:linguoboy wrote:"extendedly"?
I hoped to mean "using a lot of words". It's like when you are well educated, you can use many different words and your statements are pretty flexible in meaning. But if you are poorly educated, you do not sound "extendedly", because you use simple words (like I do), your vocabulary range is small, etc. Is that a wrong word to use here?
I'm still not sure what word it is you're looking for here. Can you give me a corresponding term in Russian?
LifeDeath wrote:Then I think the problem here is to make you partner acknowledge that "bearing". I mean, if I understood you correctly, we use the perfect if something that happened in the past still resultingpersists inat the moment of speaking.
"I've broken that arm twice before. I don't want to risk breaking it again."
He broke his arm in the past, but it still has the bearingan effect, it makes him think twice before risking it again. As I understood, the bearingeffect is his fear toof breaking it again (which is not in the past, he experiences it right in the moment of speaking, that's why he chooses the perfect).
"Have you ever eaten that? Then how do you know you wouldn't like it?"
I think in this case the second part is important. The bearing is the person's knowing that he would not like it, and his partner asks him how he could know that. He uses the perfect because it's in the moment of speaking that it is important that his partner might never have eaten something like this before.
"He's been learning English in Russia but he should study in an English-speaking country if he really wants to master it."
Honestly, I can't see any bearing in that example. I guess that the perfect progressive here implies that the action is still in process, like he hasn't dropped it out. But, I guess, that it is the very function that any perfect progressive tense fulfills - it connects something in the past with the present moment, moreover, it means that the action has been in process through all this period. That's why "He's been learning English in Russia" means that he started it some time ago, he was doing that, and didn't actually stop. That said that it is untilup to the present moment that he still learns English. Maybe the bearing is that a person understands that his partner's English could be better (and he understands it in the present moment) and that's why advises him to go to learn it abroad?
Not all perfect progressives serve to connect the past with the present moment. Remember that the past perfect progressive exists:
"He had been learning English for seven years when he decided to drop it and study Urdu instead."
Here it only serves to connect two past events.
LifeDeath wrote:So let's get back to what I started with. What if a sentence makes any bearing to meimplies a connexion for me but not to my partner? Should I know at first if it does and only then use the perfect? But if so, speaking would be so complicated.
For example, my friend suggests me tothat I break a concrete wall by the hit of my armhitting it with my arm. And I say "I've broken it twice before". So I used perfect because I don't want to risk it (like in your example). But what if my partner does not understand it? Why I used perfect, he does knot know that it has any bearing for me.
Here the issue isn't the tense, it's the lack of context. It's not even clear what "it" refers to in that sentence--the wall or the arm.
LifeDeath wrote:Another example, me and my friend are reading different stuff on the internet, and I see a riddle. I think to myself: "Mmm, I've seen this riddle many times before, I already know how to solve it". But I just say to him "I've seen this riddle many times before". So I used perfect because it has a bearing in the present moment, a result - I know how to solve it. But my partner does not know about that, so he may not understand why I used the perfect and may think that I made a mistake.
Yeah, no, English doesn't work that way. Your partner will assume you have some reason for choosing perfect and they simply don't know what it is.
LifeDeath wrote:I mean, people cannot know exactly what happens in your partner's head. Especially some self conscious people, they think a lot, and when they say something, it is just another part of their thoughts, and they may use different kind of tenses according to them. But those who are being talked to, cannot possibly know everything about that, that's why sometimes they can be confused. So my question is, might something like this occure in a real conversation? Do you always have to make sure that your partner fully knows the context of what you're talking about? Or is it a typical thing when you hear one tense from your partner when you expected another, just because it compliesfits with his thought which he didn't tell you?
The latter. You might want to read up on Gricean maxims, which are an attempt to summarise the unspoken rules people apply when trying to make sense of the things their partners say in conversation.