A perfect question

[Goloviznin Konstantin]

Yes, I had really meant   "... FOR 10 years".  

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 06:53:39 -0400 от "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>:
 
  
  
John Dunn wrote:

> Replying to Konstantin Goloviznin:
>
>> I'd like to set it more clear. If I say "I have worked in this
>> company for 2 years" means I still work in this company any way,
>> but if I don't work there any more it should be "I worked in this
>> company for 2 years".
>
> Yes.

Agreed. But see my last two paragraphs below.

>> From another hand, I remember an ex. from some manual: "I have lived
>> for in this house 10 years ". It doesn't obligatory mean that I
>> still live in the same house.
>
> This is trickier. To my British ear this sentence as it stands is on
> the borderline of being acceptable, since the preposition is normally
> omitted only if something else is present:

Actually it seems tricky because Konstantin misplaced the preposition, 
he didn't omit it. Although he wrote, "I have lived FOR in this house 10 
years," he must've meant to write "I have lived in this house FOR 10 years."

> I have lived in this house ten years now. Ten years I have lived in
> this house and never once have I spoken to my next-door neighbour. In
> both sentences 'have been living' is also possible and perhaps more
> likely; both sentences mean that you are still living in the house.
> Someone may correct me, but I cannot think of an English sentence
> with a perfect tense and a specified duration that does not
> necessarily mean that the action is still continuing.

To my mind, this is a case where grammar and pragmatics interact. 
Although technically I would say the tense does admit the possibility of 
a ten-year span that doesn't reach the present ("I have the experience 
of living here for ten consecutive years, not necessarily the last 
ten"), as a matter of pragmatics no one would use it that way. In that 
scenario, a normal native speaker of the language would choose the 
simple past, or else he would add some clarifying phrase to force the 
unexpected reading.

For the employment case, consider:
 I've worked at several companies for more than a year;
 in particular, I've worked at ABC Corp. for two years,
 DEF Co. for three years, and GHI Inc. for five years.
Obviously, all three cannot terminate at the present unless I'm holding 
three jobs at once. Even so, I believe the sentence is well-formed.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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