Parallelism in Verb Tenses

[madhukara77]

Hello Experts -

Could you please clarify below doubt -

Sentence - My Career has begun and culminated ....

In the above sentence , can we assume that "has" is common for begun as well as culminated , and the above sentence could also be re-written as
"My Career has begun and has culminated"
or it is strictly -
My Career has begun (present perfect) and culminated (past).

Thanks,
Madhukar

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

That's a good question about parallelism, especially about open markers. Since we can analyze a sentence in different ways, we need to be careful. Ultimately it depends on the context - is the meaning of the sentence clear or not? Take these examples:

I thought that Ben was interesting and liked Lucy.

Now, we've got a problem here: there are two interpretations. Perhaps 'I thought that Ben was interesting and I liked Lucy.' or 'I thought that Ben was interesting and that he liked Lucy.' We'd need to reformulate the sentence to be clear which of these meanings we intend.

As for your sentence, I'd need to have a bit more information to check if it was clear in meaning or not. However, it would be odd to say that my career 'has begun' - suggesting that it's a recent event, and that it's still going on - and then to say that my career '(has) culminated', suggesting that my career has more-or-less finished.