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Can I make a sentence like 'He has discovered America in 1492.'?

Then, what is the difference in meaning between 'He has discovered America in 1492.' and 'He discovered America in 1492.'?

When the action of 'discovered' has influenced us, can we use ' He has discovered America'?

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  • This question may be thought of as a duplicate, and the answers in the other question are quite good, but I'm not sure if they're clear to learners. -- To make one crucial point clear (before this question gets closed, which seems to be likely), the present perfect conflicts with a specific point in time when a time clause is used, but when a time clause is not used, we can use the present perfect to refer to an event that happened (but you must not say "when" in your sentence) in the past. This is why He has discovered America is fine, but He has discovered America in 1492** is not. – Damkerng T. Aug 18 '16 at 12:45
  • No. The time element in a present perfect construction (here it would be "in 1492") cannot exclude the present. It doesn't have to include the present; it simply cannot exclude it. – TimR Aug 18 '16 at 12:45
  • This sentence would be ungrammatical: He has discovered the cure to hiccups when he was a medical student. The time-phrase excludes the present. This is also ungrammatical: He has discovered the cure to hiccups tomorrow. And this too: He has discovered the cure to hiccups soon. – TimR Aug 18 '16 at 12:48
  • This is also ungrammatical: He has eaten the rice when it was hot. – TimR Aug 18 '16 at 12:56
  • More learners are confused than are helped by explanations that seek to describe the present perfect in terms of the relevance of the act to the present or the influence of the event upon the present. You do not need to overthink it. Always examine the time-phrase to see if that phrase confines the event to the past, excluding the present. If it does so, use simple past. – TimR Aug 18 '16 at 13:00

1 Answers1

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No, 'he has' is an incorrect way of phrasing the sentence as it already implies that a discovery has occurred.

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