Perfect aspect

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The perfect aspect is a grammatical aspect that refers to a state resulting from a previous action (also described as a previous action with relevance to a particular time, or a previous action viewed from the perspective of a later time).

The perfect aspect is not the same as the perfective aspect. See the perfective vs. perfect section of Grammatical aspect.

For example, "I have eaten lunch" implies both that a previous action happened ("I ate lunch") and that a current state resulted ("I am full"). This differs from the simple "I ate lunch", which implies only that an action happened, with no relevance to the present. The form "I have eaten" is referred to as a present perfect, meaning present tense, perfect aspect. (It is considered present tense instead of a past tense because the resulting state is in the present.)

In English, the perfect aspect can be combined with any simple tense (past, present or future), yielding perfect tenses that are formed using the conjugations of the auxiliary verb have and a verb:

Present perfect: I have overcome, passive I have been overcome.
Past perfect (pluperfect): I had overcome, passive I had been overcome.
Future perfect: I will (or shall) have overcome, passive I will have been overcome.

In addition to these, we can distinguish the three perfect progressive tenses:

Present perfect progressive: I have been overcoming, passive I have been being overcome.

Past perfect progressive: I had been overcoming, passive I had been being overcome.

Future perfect progressive: I will (or shall) have been overcoming

The perfect aspect can also be combined with various modal auxiliary verbs, such as would, should, could, may or might:

Conditional perfect: I would have overcome, passive I would have been overcome.
should-perfect: I should have overcome, passive I should have been overcome.

Progressives can likewise be formed from these:

Conditional perfect progressive: I would have been being overcome
should-perfect progressive: I should have been being overcome

The various perfect progressive passives are a fairly recent addition to English, and some speakers still find them questionable or even ungrammatical.^{[citation needed]}