[riverkid]

Originally Posted by rewboss

That's a straw man: I'm not taking a prescriptivist stance.

I think that you're being overly sensitive, Rewboss. I never said that you were taking a prescriptivist stance.

Originally Posted by rewboss

Yes there are. And there's precious little difference between an "override" and an "exception", in that both are deviations from a rule. The main difference is that "override" just sounds more like a rule; but if you think about it, an exception is in itself a type of rule.

The problem was that prescriptivists never took the time to figure these things out. They just fell back, still do just fall back on a catch all exceptions clause. Were this not the case, then proof would be forthcoming to support prescriptive positions. It never is because there's nothing there to provide the support

Originally Posted by rewboss

Whether you prefer to construct a new grammar rule along the lines of, "A past time adjunct with the present perfect is permissible when the sentence exceeds a certain length," or take the true descriptivist approach and say that in natural speech, speakers will frequently add a past time adjunct to a present perfect without bothering to go back and correct the verb phrase, is unimportant: both positions describe what is happening here, but one is expressed as a rule and the other is expressed as an observation.

I never made the assumption that "speakers will frequently add a past time adjunct to a present perfect without bothering to go back and correct the verb phrase". I believe that was your submission.

I did not suggest that it was a frequent occurrence. Let me go back and check. Right, I'm back. I said;

"It's often said that we don't use the present perfect with past time adverbial adjuncts. That is overwhelmingly the case BUT there are certain instances where this is overridden."

All I did was note that these overrides do occur, and I offered a potential reason for the same. I don't know for sure that it's right, but I do know that these overrides occur.