Discourse-pragmatic functions of the present perfect in American English TV and radio interviews

Abstract

The English present perfect has received a great deal of sentence-based analytical attention in the empirical linguistic literature as well as some corpus-based coverage at the discourse level, in which analysis depends on close scrutiny of the context of a structure’s placement, i.e. several utterances, turns at talk, or sentences before and after. Due to the painstaking nature of such analysis, however, corpora used to date have been relatively small. This study, via a corpus of over 12 million words from television and radio interviews in the United States, categorizes the use of discourse-pragmatic functions of 268 present perfect tokens. From this analysis, one use stood out overwhelmingly: the present perfect in the employment of position-taking or support. Also, only very rarely was the present perfect used to initiate narratives, which is a finding that does not conform to previous understandings. The study contributes to the overall knowledge of present perfect use and has implications for how the tense can be taught to English language learners.