To remedy my students’ confusion in today’s lecture regarding the use of the present tense, I looked up the definition provided by Geoffrey Leech:

‘When thinking about ‘present time’ we can think of a period including the present time and extending indefinitely into the past and into the future. In this sense, ‘present time’ is potentially all-inclusive. On the other hand, ‘past time’ is limited by the fact that it cannot extend up to the present moment. Similarly, ‘future time’ is limited by the fact that it cannot extend back as far as the present moment. However, in English the major formal distinction of Present and Past Tenses can be associated with two major TIME ZONES , ‘past’ and ‘non-past’, so that future time is subsumed under ‘non-past’.’ (p4)

 – Leech, G., ([1971] 2004). Meaning and the English Verb. Harlow: Pearson.

Taking into account Leech’s definition of present tense, particularly present-perfect we can say that ‘he has eaten’ represents the conflation of an event (the act of eating which occurred in PAST TIME) and the state of the subject (said subject exists in a state of having completed and/or experienced the event [of eating]) thereby giving us the present-perfect condition where the subject’s state is superordinate to the past event [of eating] which results in the present state [of having eaten]. To understand the present-perfect aspect of the English verb we must orient our classification around both the temporal and stative condition of the subject (‘He’ in the example used) but not the temporal nor stative condition of the act itself [the eating]. To simplify, it is about the state rather than the act, the Being rather than the Doing because, in predicate logic, Doing is a transitional state that is always subordinate to Being which is a permanent condition. We have to ‘be’ in order to ‘do’ yet when we ‘do’ we can ‘be’ something else entirely. Is this, though, an immutable condition inherent in the cognitive processes of human consciousness, or simply a facet of syntactic temporality?

Bet you never thought those everyday words could be so fundamentally profound!