High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In linguistics, the perfect (abbreviated PERF or PRF), occasionally called the retrospective (RET) to avoid confusion with the perfective aspect, is a combination of aspect and tense:ch.5 that calls a listener`s attention to the consequences, at some time of perspective (time of reference), generated by a prior situation, rather than just to the situation itself. The time of perspective itself is given by the tense of the helping verb, and usually the tense and the aspect are combined into a single tense-aspect form: the present perfect, the past perfect (also known as the pluperfect), or the future perfect.