The Use of the Present Perfect in Australian English

Engel, Dulcie M.; Ritz, Marie-Eve

doi:10.1080/07268600020006030

Cited by 80 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Engel and Ritz's (2000) analysis of tense variation in contemporary Australian English presents a detailed exposition of the discourse functions of the present perfect in data from radio programs and chat shows. As in the case of the London preadolescent narratives, Engel and Ritz (2000, 133) noted that in their data the present perfect can be used in a foregrounding function in sequences that indicate narrative progression.…”

Section: Cited the Following Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tense Variation in Preadolescent Narratives

Levey

2006

Journal of English Linguistics

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Most of the previous research on variation in tense-aspect morphology in narrative has focused on the discourse functions of the alternation between the simple past and the conversational historical present (CHP). However, it is not clear what discourse functions may be implicated in narrative by switches between the simple past and other tense-aspect categories and whether there are differences between contemporary vernacular varieties of English in this regard. This article addresses these issues by examining tense variation in the narrative complicating action clauses embedded in fifty-six narratives of personal experience recounted by a small group of preadolescents recorded in Greater London in the southeast of England. Using a variationist methodology incorporating distributional and multivariate analyses of tense variation in a circumscribed narrative subcomponent, the article examines switches between the simple past, the CHP, and the present perfect. Building on the foundational research conducted on the alternation between the simple past and the CHP in narrative, the results presented here suggest that alternations between the present perfect and other tense forms are motivated by structural and pragmatic considerations associated with the segmentation and evaluation of narrative episodes.

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Section: Cited the Following Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tense Variation in Preadolescent Narratives

Levey

2006

Journal of English Linguistics

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“…Though simple past appears to express completed-ness across a wide variety of English dialects, present perfect may be more commonly used in British and Australian English (Engel & Ritz, 2000; Hundt & Smith, 2009). Careful work identifying the semantic contexts that differentiate past perfect and simple past would be useful, just as extant work on the differences between past progressive and simple past (Leonard et al, 2007b) have provided insights into how children learn to mark tense and aspect.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the relative contributions of lexical and phonological factors to regular past tense accuracy

Horne

Fager²

2015

International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology

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Purpose Children with specific language impairment (SLI) frequently have difficulty producing the past tense. This study aimed to quantify the relative influence of telicity (i.e., the completedness of an event), verb frequency, and stem final phonemes on the production of past tense by school-age children with SLI and their typically-developing (TD) peers. Method Archival elicited production data from children with SLI between the ages of 6 and 9 and TD peers ages 4 to 8 were reanalyzed. Past tense accuracy was predicted using measures of telicity, verb frequency measures, and properties of the final consonant of the verb stem. Result All children were highly accurate when verbs were telic, the inflected form was frequently heard in the past tense, and the word ended in a sonorant/ non-alveolar consonant. All children were less accurate when verbs were atelic, rarely heard in the past tense, or ended in a word final obstruent or alveolar consonant. SLI status depressed overall accuracy rates, but did not influence how facilitative a given factor was. Conclusion Some factors that have been believed to be useful only when children are first discovering past tense, such as telicity, appear to be influential in later years as well.

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“…The English perfect has not yet grammaticized into a past tense marker (although British and Australian English show some indication of change toward the past tense; see: Comrie, 1976;Engel & Ritz, 2000;Schwenter, 1994; for its consequence for acquisition, see also Gathercole, 1986), but French, German, Italian and Castilian Spanish all show this tendency.…”

Section: Grammaticization Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 92%

Does past tense marking indicate the acquisition of the concept of temporal displacement in children's cognitive development?

Shirai

Miyata

2006

First Language

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The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in children's speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech data from four Japanese children to determine whether the use of the past tense form actually coincides with its use to signal past time. The results show that the relationship between contrastive use of the form and truly deictic past is not a straightforward one; for all the children, deictic use emerges later than the contrastive use of past and nonpast forms.

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The Use of the Present Perfect in Australian English

Cited by 80 publications

References 28 publications

Tense Variation in Preadolescent Narratives

Tense Variation in Preadolescent Narratives

Quantifying the relative contributions of lexical and phonological factors to regular past tense accuracy

Does past tense marking indicate the acquisition of the concept of temporal displacement in children's cognitive development?

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