The Perfect Tense The perfect tenses expresses action that is already completed. The present perfect tense expresses a present action that began in the past and is now completed in the present. The past perfect tense expresses an action that began in the past, was completed in the past before something else occurred. The future perfect tense expresses an action that will be completed by some point in the future. · Present Perfect Tense The present perfect tense refers to an action or state that either occurred at an indefinite time in the past (e.g., we have talked before) or began in the past and continued to the present time (e.g., he has grown impatient over the last hour). This tense is formed by have /has + the past participle. The construction of this verb tense is straightforward. The first element is have or ...