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The following is an interesting combination of the present perfect in the first clause and the present simple in the second. They supposedly refer to the same experience. Why is this mismatch okay? Any logical explanations?

Have you ever been so close to achieving your goal but things suddenly all go wrong?

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  • +1 for another interesting question. I can't put my finger on it, but it's something to do with discourse style, similar to how when telling a story that happened in the past, you have licence to switch to present tenses to make it feel more "immediate" to the audience. Possibly of interest, the tense choice for the "go" verb is between simple past and present simple. No perfect tense is possible there.
    – gotube
    Dec 20, 2022 at 2:51
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    Don't forget that present perfect and present simple are both present tenses!
    – stangdon
    Dec 20, 2022 at 3:26
  • @stangdon The catch is that the present simple (generally) describes habitual events, which is not the case in the OP.
    – Apollyon
    Dec 20, 2022 at 3:29
  • @stangdon It'd be more natural to use simple past there than present simple.
    – gotube
    Dec 20, 2022 at 3:32
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    While it's a question about the past, it doesn't refer to a specific past event - have you ever. The first part sets a scene and asks about a hypothetical event in it. Dec 20, 2022 at 3:44

2 Answers 2

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The short answer is that English speakers are not very strict with tenses, so the "rules" can be quite flexible.

In fact, your sentence could be written with consistent tenses1:

Have you ever been so close to achieving your goal but things have suddenly all gone wrong?2

However, because the first clause seems to establish a specific time (i.e., when the person has been close to achieving a goal), the second clause seems to work better with a simple (non-perfect) tense. It could even work well with the simple past tense:

Have you ever been so close to achieving your goal but things suddenly all went wrong?

Here are some more examples in which it's unclear whether the first clause establishes a specific time so that the second clause could be in the present perfect, simple present, or simple past:

I've tried to whistle that tune several times, but I've always gotten it wrong / but I always get it wrong / but I always got it wrong.

I've often tried to sleep when I haven't been tired / when I'm not tired / when I wasn't tired.

I've never mixed red with blue so that they've formed purple / so that they form purple / so that they formed purple.


1 For simplicity, I won't distinguish among "tense", "aspect", etc.

2 I think that this would read better with "when" instead of "but" (no matter which tenses are used), but that's a separate issue.

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    English is fairly strict about tense choice. This just happens to be a context where there's some flexibility, and there's a rule that governs it. That rule is what the OP is after.
    – gotube
    Dec 20, 2022 at 18:00
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    @gotube I suppose that "strict" is rather subjective, but I think that English tenses are not as strict as many askers on this site assume. That's the main point I was trying to make (perhaps not so successfully). Dec 20, 2022 at 18:19
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    This sentence is incorrect: "*Yesterday I am close to achieving my goal, but things suddenly go wrong", and yet the OP's sentence is correct. This necessarily means there is a rule that allows the use of present simple to refer to an event at a finished past time, and it's worth exploring what that rule is. Explaining the OP's sentence away by saying "English speakers are not very strict with tenses..." is simply incorrect.
    – gotube
    Dec 20, 2022 at 18:50
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    @gotube My understanding of OP's question is that he or she isn't asking about why present tense is used but why it's possible to mix perfect with non-perfect tenses ("Why is this mismatch okay?"). Perhaps we understand the question differently. Dec 20, 2022 at 19:00
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Have you ever been so close to achieving your goal but things suddenly all go wrong?

The right answer here is that you have two independent clauses in the sentence separated with a conjunction (but). Another example would be when someone gets hired at a company, they might be introduced thus on their first week:

Pat has worked as an assassin for a variety of organizations and now they are bringing their hands-on personnel skills to our HR department.

Or:

Pat can take this assignment because he's done this kind of work dozens of times before.

The second clause I the first example I give can be expected to be (and is) present continuous because they are actively in the process of joining the company.

Our friends at the Cambridge Dictionary provide support for this in British English grammar in their article on clauses, but they don't provide a rule along the lines of "if (x situation), then verbs may have mismatched tenses" that I found in my looking for one.

If one is looking for a hard-and-fast rule for why tense mismatch is allowed in some cases but not others, it might be possible to find a book from what's seen as an authoritative source describing it, but the English language is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. There's no single governing body like the Académie Française (French Academy), which has authority over "proper" French, or the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (Association of the Spanish Language), which are a collection of similarly minded organizations around the world that focus on maintaining the consistency of the Spanish language.

Rather, Standard English just kind of wings it, because there's 1) there's no single Standard English, and 2) no single place that (successfully) defines rules for it. Frankly, something in English is grammatically correct once enough people use it that it enters regular usage, which can be frustrating for English language learners -- but is also a pretty egalitarian way of operating!

If you're interested in the history of how English came to be and why it's so loosey-goosey, I highly recommend The Last Lingua Franca: English until the return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler, as it does a deep dive of why English became what it is, while also looking at other languages (namely Latin) that have served the same purpose and have similar origins.

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  • The OP's sentence in statement form is incorrect: "I have been so close to achieving my goals, but everything goes wrong." If the answer were as simple as the conjunction allowing tense changes, then this sentence too would be correct, but it's not. This question requires a rule that explains why the OP's question is correct, but my statement version is incorrect.
    – gotube
    Jan 10, 2023 at 16:20
  • On the contrary, OP's modified sentence that you wrote is fine, and could be expected to be seen in writing or heard in speech, e.g. by someone who's at their wits' end. If you can specify what you think is wrong with the sentence you put, I'd be curious to see it. Could it be written in a way that flows or sounds better or more poetically? Sure; the sentence would be served by a then following but. That would change the meaning to "things go wrong as a result of my being close to achieving my goals" from "things go wrong whether or not I am close to achieving my goals."
    – pmusser
    Jan 11, 2023 at 19:22
  • Then we just disagree. I can't think of a context where my modified version is acceptable, and it certainly doesn't work the way the OP's sentence does.
    – gotube
    Jan 12, 2023 at 16:59

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