[shun]

TDOL,

You wrote:

Ex: *They worked here for the past five years.
Do they still work here? Yes, so the past is innapropriate.

:D My reply: Please understand I agree with you 100%. But how should we say it? You are implying that even with specific past time, sometimes, using Simple Past is inappropriate. However, this goes against the normal rule as I quoted above:

NOTE: We do NOT use specific time expressions with the Present Perfect. We cannot say, for example, "I have eaten spaghetti yesterday."
http://conversa1.com/presentperfectpastsimple.htm

How shall we explain the whole thing? Below, I try to give my supposition, or conclusion, that is deduced from all the opinions here.

:agrue: I have been seeking for help for a long time and I was told that we may easily find examples that violate the agreement. We may search in the pattern "have seen yesterday", and we will get many examples violating our quotations before:

Ex: But we have seen yesterday, that Judah and Ephraim are to be taken as the same;
Ex: On the other hand, this of course leads here only to practical construction, architecture is something of another sort...not always so bad, I have seen yesterday affamed dwellings by a japanese architect that.....
Ex: ''What I have seen yesterday and today is people coming in to use the computers because they needed to communicate with relatives in other states.''
Ex: I have seen yesterday something suspiciously like this, but this was 2.0.14 on a Cabriolet board and otherwise Red Hat 3.0.3, i.e. no shared libraries at all.

That is to say, using the pattern "have seen yesterday", replace SEEN with other past verbs like discussed, arrived/ finished/ shown/ told/ got/ received/ agreed/ found/ lost/ decided/ etc., or replace YESTERDAY with last year/ month/ week/ etc., we still easily find a number of examples -- "Present Perfect with YESTERDAY". What does this finding prove?

If we add things all up, we may find something consistent, though. We may prove the rule that Present Perfect doesn't stay with specific past time, is just not there. Grammar writers provide us a non-existent rule that in turn forces themselves to hide away the Past Family. It is "circular vice", or a vice circle, no pun intended. If this is not the conclusion, then what is?

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More evidence is that Cas wrote:

That’s why *"I have lived in Japan in the past week" is ungrammatical.

If according to Cas, Present Perfect is ungrammatical staying with "in the past week", why then it is grammatical with "in the past two weeks"?

:P But if Present Perfect is ungrammatical with "in the past two weeks", why then it is grammatical with "in the past 1000 weeks"? And then, why it is grammatical with "in the past five years"? They are of the same pattern!!!

That is, from the beginning to the present, logically, Cas regarded that Present Perfect is not compatible with "in the past five weeks".

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More evidence is that a gentleman here regarded our rules are nothing but a viewpoint:

You CANNOT use the Present Perfect with time expressions such as "yesterday," "one year ago," "last week," "when I was a chlid," "when I lived in Japan," "at that moment," "that day" or "one day."
== http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/presentperfect.html (a viewpoint, doesn't make it a rule.)

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Of course, as we see from above, your statement is also a disagreement to the rule.

The temporary conclusion here is obvious: Nobody agrees to such a rule.

What do you say?
:) :)