The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases

Temporal adverbials and the present perfect/past tense alternation

“…one of the L2 varieties or in one of the "transplanted" L1 varieties such as AusE; see Ritz 2010), it remains speculative whether this development will gain currency over time and eventually spread to other varieties.…”

Perfect in the dialects of the British variety of Present-Day English

“…В английском языке (в его разных вариантах) употребление перфекта с наречиями прошедшего времени и в нарративных контекстах не является редкостью (Ritz, Engel 2008, Ritz 2010, Elsness 2009. Так, в работе Дж.…”

The Present Perfect Has Only Gone And Changed, Hasn’t It? The Continuing Divergence of the Narrative Perfect

“…However, it is now a more or less indisputable fact that some varieties of non-standard native English, most notably colloquial British English (Fryd 1998, Walker 2011 and certain registers of Australian English (Ritz 2010) do indeed occasionally use the HAVE-perfect with specific time reference and as a narrative form 1 , with the result that declarations such as that of Caudal and Roussarie (2006 : 16) to the effect that "It is rather clear that English present perfect cannot really accept narrative uses […] and it is a well-known fact that it rejects past time temporal modifiers", are less than uniformly tenable, and perhaps increasingly so.…”

“…The first is questioning whether we are right to assume that the narrative present perfect (narrative PP), as I shall refer to it here, for reasons that will be made fully explicit, is indeed an emergent form, and secondly attempting to sketch the possible links between the narrative PP and a seemingly unrelated phenomenon, which I refer to as the extraordinary ONLY. In so doing, we will be examining, and indeed lending support, to a key insight in the literature, that of the mirativity of the narrative perfect first adumbrated by Ritz (2010).…”