“Vivid narrative use” and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English

Revisiting the ‘present perfect’: Semantic analysis of Andean colonial documents

“…The description of the wrongdoing, then, resembles personal narratives, which are found to favor the use of the present perfect (Labov and Waletsky, 1967;Givon, 1982;cf. for Spanish, Herná ndez, 2006; for Australian English, Ritz and Engel, 2008). As expected, a high incidence of the present perfect is found in these documents, and only in the description of the wrongdoing.…”

“…Research has shown that the present perfect is a linguistic variable sensitive to event and discourse structure (cf. Hovav and Levin, 2001;Portner, 2003), both in conversational (Herná ndez, 2006;Ritz and Engel, 2008;Rodríguez Louro, 2009) and narrative styles (Givon, 1982;Rodríguez National Archive of Peru and the Archive of the Archbishop of Lima. b Twenty-two documents come from Rivarola (2000), and the remaining 24 are documents collected by the author from the National Archive of Peru and the Archive of the Archbishop of Lima.…”

“…To summarize, the semantic and syntactic behavior of the main verb, together with the discourse properties of the event structure it is associated with, can serve as the foundation for an event structure-based analysis (cf. Hovav and Levin, 2001;Herná ndez, 2006;Ritz and Engel, 2008). Table 2 displays the linguistic factors considered in the analysis.…”

“…Since the actions of the wrongdoing itself are relevant to the speech time when the complaint is being made, one could argue that the PP is being used to make more salient, more vivid (cf. Ritz and Engel, 2008), and more real, the actions being referred to.…”

Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Australian English: A Corpus-based Study

“…The form-based approach adopted in this paper should be complemented by future functional analyses to determine whether the AusE data contain any instances of the innovative, narrative present perfect identified byRitz and Engel (2008) andRitz (2010).…”