The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English

Abstract

This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling, contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.