Perfect valentine gift for boyfriend to be confused with Perfective aspect. An example of a perfect construction is I have made dinner. In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated-verb form. In some analyses, the perfect is identified as one of the grammatical aspects.

In the perfect aspect, the event being referred to is viewed as already completed at the time of reference. The perfect is not necessarily incompatible with other grammatical aspects. The pluperfect and future perfect forms combine perfect aspect with past and future tense respectively. This can be considered to be the same as resultative perfect. Yo estaba andando en el bosque. De pronto he pisado una culebra.

Me ha mordido en la pierna. I was walking in the forest. Suddenly I stepped on a snake. It bit me in the leg. In some languages a type of tense has been noted with exactly the opposite implication to a perfect. This type of tense is known as discontinuous past. The have-perfect developed from a construction where the verb meaning have denoted possession, and the past participle was an adjective modifying the object, as in I have the work done.

The be-perfect developed similarly, from a construction where the verb meaning be was an ordinary copula and the participle expressed a resultative state of the subject. Languages that use these constructions can generally inflect the auxiliary to produce different verb forms for the perfect aspect: the pluperfect or past perfect is produced with the auxiliary in the past tense, the future perfect with the auxiliary in the future tense, and so on. The use of auxiliaries and meaning of the constructions in various languages are described below. English present perfect and to the simple past. The present perfect is often used also for completed events where English would use the simple past. French and Italian, this use disappeared by the 18th century.