[Nightedge]

-The Facebook account has been created (Is the tense here wrong?) since 2005 to enhance communication with the community of German majors.


1. Do you think it is correct?

[susan53]

It's the choice of lexis which is wrong. Since + past date indicates an event that has been on-going for the whole of that period - from the past to the present - eg I have lived here since 1990.

But "create" is something you do at a specific time and is then finished. So here the writer would have to say...

The website was created in 2005 to ...

if it was just a very slow process and they started in 2005 but have only just finished and opened the website they could say

We have been creating the website since 2005.

but ten years to create a website seems very unlikely. I think what the writer actually meant was

The website was created in 2005 and has been under constant development since then.

or

The website was created in 2005 and has been regularly updated.

[Nightedge]

Excellent answer. Thank you.

But since I was a student decades ago, I have been looking, probably in vain, for rules about this 'since' usage. I know that we could say

-He has died since 2005.

But it sounds like the act of dying has been repeated over the past decade, which makes no sense. Do you think there's any rule governing this usage? ie why 'create' is wrong but 'die is correct, when they are both non-continuous verbs. But I guess no rules exist in this case....

[susan53]

But you can't say He has died since 2005 for exactly the reasons you state. Dying is something that takes place at one specific moment, so the use of the present perfect and a since time phrase, both expressing a past to present event, makes no sense. you could say :
He died in 2005
or
He has been dead since 2005
but not the sentence that you suggest.

[Nightedge]

I'm happy to hear that one of my grammatical doubt has disappeared. But I got the idea of some posts on this forum; from somewhere I don't remember, someone has writen

-He has since died.
-He has died since then. (a non-definite adverb, different from '2005' above)

Or things like that. Do you think this structure is correct?