The expression of the perfect in East and South-East Asian Englishes

Abstract

This paper looks at variation in the expression of perfect meaning in Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, India, Singapore and the Philippines) as represented in the spoken component of theInternational Corpus of English. Findings confirm the existence of levelling between the present perfect and simple past in these varieties, and that the tendency of the present perfect to lose ground to the preterite is more pronounced in these New Englishes than in British English, especially in the expression of recent past. The occurrence of other variants in the corpus is accounted for in terms of the influence of the respective substrate languages, cognitive constraints characteristic of language-contact situations, pragmatic contextual factors such as the scant use of adverbial support, and, especially, diffusion from the input language, which is an earlier variety of spoken, non-standard English. Relevant intravarietal differences are also discussed and attributed to the different phases of development in which the four varieties currently find themselves.

The present perfect in Irish English

“…For Werner (, ), the key to unravelling the perfect system rests with the relative specificity of temporal adverbs against which present and past tense and present perfect uses are then related and can be measured. For Seoane and Suárez‐Gómez () the key is unravelling the set of semantic functions of the perfective and comparing their realisation between present perfects and the present and past tenses. As Table shows, this approach has considerable merit, for it regards each perfective type as a variable, so that one proceeds from meaning to expression.…”

“…The first semantic function expresses a ‘state leading up to the present’ (Quirk et al. : 192), ‘a state‐up‐to‐the‐present’ (Leech : 36–37), an ‘extended now’ sense (Hickey : 196), a ‘continuative’ (as opposed to the others being ‘non‐continuative’) time frame (Comrie 1976; Huddleston : 141; van Rooy ), and a ‘persistent situation’ (Seoane & Suárez‐Gómez ). For McCawley () and Kallen (: 123) it is a ‘universal perfect’ for its meaning relates to a state of affairs continuing without a break ever since an event in the past occurred, equating it with the Irish uses of the ‘extended now’ or ‘extended present’ tense (Kallen : 123).…”

“…So far our analysis has only considered perfect forms, their equivalents, and their collocations. The final analysis is inspired by Seoane & Suárez‐Gómez (: 14) who analyse four perfective functions: ‘resultative’, ‘experiential’, ‘recent past’ and ‘persistent situation’ (for what is above called ‘continuative’), and the verb forms of their realisations: past tense, present perfect, the base form, and other forms in a set of ten common verbs ( come, finish, get, give, go, hear, say, see, tell and think ) using the face‐to‐face conversational data from five ICE‐corpora. In that paper, they show that the vast majority of those four semantic functional categories (236/292 occurrences) are realised with the present perfect.…”

English in Southeast Asia: Pedagogical and policy implications

“…It is now evident that many new varieties of English share non‐standard morpho‐syntactic forms and that this therefore questions the essential role of the second language (Deterding & Kirkpatrick ; Mesthrie ). In a recent study on the use of the perfect in East and Southeast Asian Englishes, as illustrated in the spoken sections of four corpora of the International Corpus of English, namely Hong Kong, India, Singapore and the Philippines (Seoane & Suarez‐Gomes ), the authors’ findings indicate that there is a levelling in the use of the present perfect and the simple past in these Asian varieties of English, and that this levelling is also reflected in contemporary British English. It is also a well‐known feature of American English.…”

Language contact in Gibraltar English: A pilot study with ICE-GBR

“…7 The size of ICE, one million words per variety, may be considered small by comparison with current standards (see BNC, with 100 million words, COCA, with 520 million words, etc.). Yet it is sufficient for the study of grammatical variation, as shown by Seoane and Suárez-Gómez's (2013) study of the perfect meaning in Asian varieties, by Suárez-Gómez (2014), which analyses relative clauses, and by Loureiro-Porto (2016), which focuses on modal verbs. However, if the aim is to study low frequency items, such as lexical elements, specific collocations or contractions and even syntactic constructions (e.g., García-Castro 2017), ICE's size is clearly one of its main disadvantages.…”