is it gramatically right to say "I wrote this recently"
recently
I'd say "I've written this recently" and "I wrote this a short time ago". But maybe it's just me...
``I wrote this recently'' is preferred over ``I have written this recently'' in American English. Both sentences are gramatically correct.
The difference seems to be cultural rather than linguistic. Both the British and the Americans use these two tenses in the same way to mean the same thing, but their respective _perceptions_ of whether or not something is truly linked to the present are quite different. Americans tend to draw the line between "present" and "past" very close to this very instant; the British place this line considerably deeper in the past. So Americans often say "I ate breakfast this morning" because, in their culture, breakfast is already a done deal, pure history. But the British often say "I've eaten breakfast this morning" because they consider the entire day to be part of the immediate present.
To paraphrase an old saying, to the Americans, 100 days is a long time; to the British, 100 years ago is recent. But both groups of speakers use the past simple to describe things that they perceive as being completely isolated and completed in the past, and they use the present perfect to describe things that they perceive as being somehow linked to the present.
To paraphrase an old saying, to the Americans, 100 days is a long time; to the British, 100 years ago is recent. But both groups of speakers use the past simple to describe things that they perceive as being completely isolated and completed in the past, and they use the present perfect to describe things that they perceive as being somehow linked to the present.
"I wrote" is the simple past; "I have written" is the perfect. The simple past is our maid-of-all-work. The perfect is meant to convey a sense of completion.
"What did you do next?"
"I ate breakfast."
"Would you like some breakfast?"
"No, thanks, I have eaten already."
I see no regionalism involved: the difference is merely in the sense one wishes to convey. If Americans really are prone to use the perfect where the simple will serve, in my mind the cause would be hypercorrection, just as the Brits (and pompous Americans) tend to use "which" when they mean "that".
"What did you do next?"
"I ate breakfast."
"Would you like some breakfast?"
"No, thanks, I have eaten already."
I see no regionalism involved: the difference is merely in the sense one wishes to convey. If Americans really are prone to use the perfect where the simple will serve, in my mind the cause would be hypercorrection, just as the Brits (and pompous Americans) tend to use "which" when they mean "that".
> If Americans really are prone to use the perfect where the simple will serve
It's the opposite. BE uses present perfect in some situation wher AE used simple past. Example: I have eaten breakfast this morning.
It's the opposite. BE uses present perfect in some situation wher AE used simple past. Example: I have eaten breakfast this morning.
Note though that the perfect aspect is very often used with modal constructions, though, in even NAE, in the place of using the past tense proper, due to the past tense forms of modal verbs no longer being functionally tied to their historical present tense equivalents, which has effectively rendered the past tense proper unusable in most modal constructions. However, things are complicated with "new" modal constructions in spoken NAE, as many of them such as "hafta" and "needta" have a functional past tense, *but* this past tense pertains to the modal construction itself, and not to the main verb, so to specify practical pastness for the main verb, perfect aspect still has to be used nonetheless for such constructions.