Brief contents of the course

The category of time correlation is one of the interpretations of the perfect aspect. It denotes the priority of the action to another action or to the moment of speaking. The perfect form of a limitive verb denotes reaching a limit: “What you expected has happened.”

If the verb lexically means a change of the state, its perfect will have the meaning of the result: “People have grown more sensitive to the environment.”
Durative verbs in the perfect form have the meaning of the action, terminated at the present moment: “This really has meant something to me, really.
We have always felt that.'
The Present form of Perfect functions mostly in the direct speech.
Aspect forms of the verbs can be expressed only within a certain tense, forms of verbs unite tense and aspect categories. The past prefect forms show the correlation of the action with time in the past, expressed by another action or a direct time marker. Thus, in the past perfect it is the pre-past tense meaning that is more important than the perfect aspect. This is one of the reasons why this category of time correlation is called a category, not just a member of the opposition in the aspect category. “I read the book – He said he had read the book” – they differ not by the category of aspect, but by the pre-past time. The future perfect forms are correlated with a time point in future, it denotes an action as the one which will be completed by this point. It is rarely used in speech:
I'll see you tomorrow night. I shall have thought over your business by then.
The meaning of the perfect continuous forms is another argument in favour of time correlation as a separate category. It explains how both continuous aspect and perfect correlation function together. It shows the process as flowing until it reaches the point of its termination. Limitive verbs in this form denote a repeated action: “Have you been sending me a lot of telegrams?” The Past form is used in the meaning of a prior action; the future form is not used.
To fit the category of time correlation into the aspect system we can speak of the aspect opposition continuous-non-continuous as the aspective category of development.