Did you win/Have you won the game of chess?

[anikoa]

Did you win/Have you won the game of chess?

I don't understand why 'Have you won' is correct?

 

[rida3]

Both are correct. 'Did you win' is in the past tense. 'Have you won' is in the present perfect. Each use depends on the 'time' of action.
Hope this will help a pretty girl

 

[anikoa]

Thank you for your reply.

I know both of these tenses. I have found this exercise on the Internet and when I checked my answers, it said, my answer wasn't correct, because I have chosen 'Did you win'. There were no other sentences or time expressions that could have helped me.

 

[philo2009]

The sentence is not ungrammatical as such, but it is semantically absurd.

The present perfect is not appropriate when referring to finished past events that are (at least without the aid of time travel!) inherently incapable of occurring again. That particular game of chess to which reference is being made cannot recur. Even if you reconstructed it move by move, it would simply be a copy of the original event, not a natural recurrence of it.

For that reason the present perfect is unacceptable and thus, to all practical intents and purposes, 'incorrect'.

 

[konungursvia]

The sentence is not ungrammatical as such, but it is semantically absurd.

The present perfect is not appropriate when referring to finished past events that are (at least without the aid of time travel!) inherently incapable of occurring again. That particular game of chess to which reference is being made cannot recur. Even if you reconstructed it move by move, it would simply be a copy of the original event not a natural recurrence of it.

For that reason the present perfect is unacceptable and thus, to all practical intents and purposes, 'incorrect'.

I am not sure I agree with any of this. Both are possible. One treats the game as a single past event, a tiny island in the stream of life: "Did you win?" This implies the expectation that the game was played, and that someone would win.

The other treats the game as a turning point, either emotionally, financially, socially, or in some other way. The expectation is that someone will win, and that after the win, he or she will feel differently about chess, life, or some other domain. "Have you won?"

Having said that, the most frequent approach in AmE is "Did you?" whereas the other is more common in The Other Place: "Have you?"

Either aspect can be taken, at the speaker's complete and free discretion.

 

[philo2009]

There is naturally nothing wrong with simply asking someone 'Have you won?' with reference to a game that is only just finished. This would be a perfectly standard use of the present perfect.

The issue here is referring back to a game by means of a demonstrative adjective ('that') which effectively assigns it, from a linguistic viewpoint, to the realm of past (as opposed to 'recently completed') events.

Whether American English speakers would consider the sentence

Have you won that game of chess?

, as opposed to

Did you win that game of chess?

, acceptable is something on which I cannot offer any definitive judgement (although, frankly, I think it highly improbable!), but it certainly would not be considered contextually acceptable/natural in British English!

N.B. I naturally do not mean to imply by the above that the use of 'that' is at all times and in all contexts restricted to past events!

 

[konungursvia]

That sounds reasonable. But you can still ask:

Have you won that game of chess?

Under many circumstances, including the one in which "that game" refers to a unique type of game -- for example a complete route -- rather than a single game selected at random. But I think we're narrowing the discussion a bit here.

 

[Raymott]

I think the possible contexts for "Have you won that game of chess?" are few in real life. If "yet" is added, it becomes much more likely.
We have to assume that the asker isn't present at the chess game, so does not know if it's completed yet. Perhaps the speaker is on the phone to the player, or the player is playing by email over a long time period.

We also have to assume that the speaker assumes that the player is going to win. With these assumptions, the question reduces to "Have you finished that game of chess yet?"
The context I'm thinking of is a wife in bed, yelling to her husband on the computer in the next room, "Have you won that game of chess, yet?". I can't imagine it without "yet".

 

[5jj]

The original question was about the game of chess, not that game, so philo's point about that 'assigning it to the past' is not really relevant.

If the people concerned have only just stopped playing, then there is no question of the present perfect in speech, being either semantically absurd or some sort of turning of point. It is simply fairly natural BrE.

A final minor point. 'The game of chess' seems slightly unnatural to me, I'd expect 'the chess match/game' or,as the people almost certainly know what they are referring to, simply 'the match/game.'

In writing - in a letter for example - the situation is different. 'Did you win the/that chess match?' would be natural.

 

[Raymott]

The original question was about the game of chess, not that game, so philo's point about that 'assigning it to the past' is not really relevant.

Oops, Yes I had that ("the") in the back of my mind. Nevertheless, in my response, I don't think it matters. "That" or "the" both work.

 

[philo2009]

I can't imagine it without "yet".

Indeed - at least, by implication!

 

[philo2009]

The original question was about the game of chess, not that game,

You are quite correct. I did indeed misquote the original sentence.

I would, however, still maintain, for reasons touched on by Raymott and myself, that the questioner's original answer key was quite justified, from the viewpoint of practical, useful English language instruction, to label the sentence in question 'incorrect', provided (as I made quite clear in my original response) that we understand 'incorrect' to mean 'unacceptable by reason of extreme unnaturalness/implausibility' rather than specifically ungrammatical.

 

[5jj]

.. the questioner's original answer key was quite justified, from the viewpoint of practical, useful English language instruction, to label the sentence in question 'incorrect', provided (as I made quite clear in my original response) that we understand 'incorrect' to mean 'unacceptable by reason of extreme unnaturalness/implausibility' rather than specifically ungrammatical.

That is interesting provided that we understand 'interesting' to mean 'piffle'. The present perfect may well be less likely than the past simple in that context, but it is neither extremely implausible nor extremely unnatural.

 

[philo2009]

I imagined that the questioner had been doing a fairly standard kind of grammar exercise in which it was specified that reference was to a game of chess known by the speaker to have been played earlier, and where the instruction was to choose the most appropriate tense to fit the situation, in which case 'Have you won...?' would most definitely be strange/absurd, and thus, within the context of the exercise, an "incorrect" answer. Perhaps (s)he would care to comment as to whether such was in fact the case.

Naturally, however, it is not especially difficult to imagine other scenarii in which such a sentence could quite sensibly be uttered.

 

[5jj]

Naturally, however, it is not especially difficult to imagine other scenarii in which such a sentence could quite sensibly be uttered.

Quite, and no scenario was given

Within the context of the limited information that was given in the original question, I suggest that to call the use of the present perfect 'semantically absurd' or 'incorrect' is unhelpful.

 

[philo2009]

Fair enough. I probably shold have ascertained that the scenario I was assuming applied.

I still, however, strongly suspect that it does, and await the questioner's confirmation...