From the last one month each of us has been working on the same project.
My book says use for in place of from. Why not from? And in which case we use from in past perfect tense?
Please help.
-
This is a hard question to answer. I have formally studied four Indo-European languages in addition to my native English, and there seem to be few cognizable rules about which prepositions are permitted in which circumstances. (The rules presumably exist, but they are obscure.) In any case, "for" can act as a synonym for "during," but "from" cannot. I can give no deep reason for that fact. Moreover, you talk about the past perfect, but give no examples so your question lacks any context. I suggest that you edit your question to give one or more specific examples involving the past perfect.– Jeff MorrowJan 2, 2018 at 4:16
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
You use from .. to to indicate that something occurred/will occur between specified start end end dates/events. You use from without a to to indicate that something will start to happen at a specified date/event in the future. You would use since to indicate that something started at a specified date/event in the past and may have continued until the present.
You use for to indicate that something took, or will take, a specified period of time.
In your example sentence, you specifiy a period of time, so for is the correct term to use.
Note that the sentence would be more natuaral written like this:
For the past month all of us have been working on the same project.
the past month means a period of one month running up to today.
all of us gives the impression that it's a unified effort, whereas each of us implies that you acted independently. Here are a couple of examples to show the difference:
all of us bought John a birthday present - we each put some money in and then jointly bought one present
each of us bought John a birthday present - we each indepenently bought a separate present
