The Present Perfect as a core feature of World Englishes

Abstract

This paper presents central results from a larger corpus-based project (see Werner 2013a; 2013b; 2014) that investigates the usage of the Present Perfect (HAVE + past participle) across World Englishes. It aims at complementing other empirical studies which merely focus on differences between British and American English or which investigate the alternation of the Present Perfect with other timereference forms.Findings are based on material from the International Corpus of English (ICE), which has been annotated for various language-internal factors (such as semantics, preceding tense, etc.), so that the distributions and the relative importance of these factors can be analyzed. I employ explorative aggregative methods to find measures of similarity between the various varieties of English under investigation. In addition, this approach allows a systematic investigation of the influence of language-external variables (such as text types, variety types, geographical location) across all varieties. Furthermore, a case study on evidence of an allegedly extended functional range of the Present Perfect in terms of tenselike usage is presented.The data reveal (i) that the Present Perfect can be seen as a globalized or core feature of world-wide varieties of English, and (ii) that geographical location, variety types, mode of discourse, genres and text types only have a weak effect when associations between varieties are explored; significant groupings across all varieties appear along register lines, however. The case study shows that creative usage in terms of a functional extension of the Present Perfect occurs in the ICE data, albeit largely restricted to informal speech in L1 varieties and to L2 varieties, where influence from both the substrate and through learner language is highly likely. The case study further exemplifies layering between the Present Perfect and its competitor, the Simple Past, in indefinite temporal environments.

The role of age and gender in grammatical variation in world Englishes

“…(2) I just finished law school in the States and I passed the Minnesota bar and I trained in the U S. . <ICE-PHI: S1A-010#3:1:B > Previous research on the expression of the perfect in world Englishes (Davydova, 2011;Suárez-Gómez, 2019;Seoane & Suárez-Gómez, 2013;Werner, 2014;Yao & Collins, 2012) confirms that the envelope of variation needs to be expanded beyond the canonical periphrasis have + past participle (1) and the increasingly more frequent preterite…”

“…Prescriptive grammar establishes the periphrastic construction have + past participle, as in example (1), as the expected form to express the present perfect. However, research within the corpus‐linguistics tradition shows that other forms such as the preterite (2) are commonly attested in contemporary English to express the same meaning, both in native and non‐native varieties (Davydova, 2011; Elsness, 1997, 2009; Hundt & Smith, 2009; Kirk, 2009; Miller, 2000, 2004; Yao & Collins, 2012; Suárez‐Gómez, 2019; Seoane & Suárez‐Gómez, 2013; Werner, 2014; to name just a few). Such variability in the expression of perfect meaning is also attested in the history of the English language (Rissanen, 1999, p. 224–225).…”

“…Previous research on the expression of the perfect in world Englishes (Davydova, 2011; Suárez‐Gómez, 2019; Seoane & Suárez‐Gómez, 2013; Werner, 2014; Yao & Collins, 2012) confirms that the envelope of variation needs to be expanded beyond the canonical periphrasis have + past participle (1) and the increasingly more frequent preterite (2) to include additional verbal forms used for the same function: auxiliary be + past participle (3) and bare past participles (4). And you know the days are gone when we could see we could think of uh people bringing honey etcetra from the forest.…”

L1 Influence on the Use of the English Present Perfect: A Corpus Analysis of Russian and Spanish Learners’ Essays

“…Although variation in the uses of the PP by native and non-native speakers of English has been approached in a number of works (e.g., Elsness, 1997;Hundt & Smith, 2009;Davydova, 2011Davydova, , 2012Yao & Collins, 2012;Seoane & Suárez-Gómez, 2013;Werner, 2013Werner, , 2014, the findings are quite contradictory. For example, on the one hand, Davydova (2011), who studied the uses of the PP in a corpus of non-native Russian, German and Indian varieties of English, and compared them with the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English (LLC), reported that the PP is underrepresented in the studied varieties of English compared to the corpus L1 English, which can be explained by the complexity of this strategy, so that L2 speakers appear to avoid using the PP due to its complexity and opt for the Past Simple instead.…”