"This palace was built centuries ago"
The past perfect is a verbal tense in our language that allows us to refer to an action carried out in the past . There are two types of past perfect: the simple past perfect and the compound past perfect .
past perfect simple
The past perfect simple is used when the act in question is located at a time prior to the expression . In these cases, the activity is considered completed and has no necessary link with the present .
For example: “The day before yesterday I had lunch with Rodrigo in a restaurant downtown.” As can be seen, the speaker points out an action that took place in the past ( "the day before yesterday" ), resorting to the past perfect simple for the conjugation of the verb ( "lunched" ). That lunch does not continue, but ended.
Other examples of the simple past tense: “The policeman shot without hesitation,” “The old man wrote his will in a few minutes and gave it to the lawyer,” “I already came out of the shower.”
past perfect compound
The past perfect compound , meanwhile, places the action in a moment prior to the present, but in a period that has not yet ended . The activity , in this framework, maintains a relationship with the current time period.
With the past perfect compound, in short, it indicates that there is still an influence of the action performed. The construction of these expressions is done with the auxiliary verb haber plus the participle of the verb . The verb haber is conjugated in the following way: he, has, ha, we have, habéis / han, han . The participle does not depend on the person or the number, so there is only one option for each verb.
“I yelled a lot at the game” is an example of the past perfect compound. The subject comments that some time ago he strained his voice ( "I screamed" ), which could be suggesting the possible cause of dysphonia. In fact, we can assume that his interlocutor asked him why his voice sounded that way, and that it was only then that he offered an explanation. It would be different to say "I screamed a lot in the '78 game" , something distant in the past, which has probably left no traces in time.
This link that the compound past perfect has with the present not only allows us to print different nuances in our speech, but it usually gives rise to different conversations than those of the simple past perfect. As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is not uncommon for it to be used to give an explanation, whether the interlocutor has asked for it or not. «Why can't you concentrate? -I haven't slept well, I'm sorry...», «I don't think I can wear this suit because I've eaten too much», «Yes, I've read it, but I didn't understand it well.»
"I've screamed a lot"
Its use
As with other technical language issues, the rules set out above are not always respected in everyday speech. To be more precise, the use of tenses is different in each country, and sometimes in their respective regions. Broadly speaking, we can say that in Argentina the use of the simple past tense is more common to describe any action or situation from the past, while in Spain the opposite is true, speakers resort to the compound even for sentences that describe very old events.
But this is not true for all citizens of these two countries, since usage may also vary in their respective provinces and cities. In any case, we must clarify that this difference in the use of past tenses does not lead to an impossibility of understanding between Argentines and Spaniards. The reason they can be understood is mainly due to the lack of technical tools we have to speak our own language, since we learn it in a "natural" way.