The evolution of the “hot news” perfect in English
A study of register-specific linguistic change
This paper deals with the “hot news” use of the English present perfect. Previous research has suggested that this use marks the end point of the perfect category, paving the way for further grammaticalisation to a perfective or past tense. To examine its historical development in Modern English, verb forms in the leads of hard news reports in the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald were examined, with comparison made between two time periods, 1851–1900 and 1951–2000. Attention was given to contextual influence on the choice between the present perfect and the past tense for expressing hot news meanings. The quantitative findings show that the hot news perfect has not taken over the ground of other tense forms, but has become increasingly associated with unspecified, recent past time. The evolution of the English present perfect in general is characterised by register-mediated functional specialisation.
References
The New York Times Archives
The Sydney Morning Herald Archives
Bednarek, Monika and Helen Caple
2012 News Discourse. London: Continuum.
Bell, Allan
1991 The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Biber, Douglas and Bethany Gray
2013 “
Being Specific about Historical Change: The Influence of Sub-Register”.
Journal of English Linguistics 41 (2): 104–34.
Binnick, Robert I
1991 Time and The Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brinton, Laurel
1988 The Development of English Aspectual Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca
1994 The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carey, Kathleen
1994 “
Pragmatics, Subjectivity and the Grammaticalization of the English Perfect”. PhD thesis. University of California, San Diego.
Cedergren, Henrietta J. and David Sankoff
1974 “
Variable Rules: Performance as a Statistical Reflection of Competence”.
Language 50 (2): 333–55.
Chafe, Wallace
1976 “
Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Point of View”. In
Charles N. Li (ed.),
Subject and Topic, 27–55. New York: Academic Press.
Comrie, Bernard
1976 Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copple, Mary T
2011 “
Tracking the Constraints on a Grammaticalizing Perfect(ive)”.
Language Variation and Change 23 (2): 163–91.
Cotter, Colleen
2010 News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Defromont, Hubert J
1973 Perfectives du Verbe Anglais Contemporain: Perfectives du Verbe Anglais Contemporain: Étude Comparée de L’aspect Transcendant dans les Systėmes Verbaux Anglais et Français. The Hague: Mouton.
Elsness, Johan
1997 The Perfect and the Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Elsness, Johan
2009 “
The Present Perfect and the Preterite”. In
Günter Rohdenburg and
Julia Schlüter (eds),
One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English, 228–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engel, Dulcie and Marie-Eve Ritz
2000 “
The Use of the Present Perfect in Australian English”.
Australian Journal of Linguistics 20 (2): 119–40.
Feez, Susan, Rick Iedema and Peter R.R. White
2008 Media Literacy. Surry Hills: New South Wales Adult Migrant Education Service.
Fenn, Peter
1987 A Semantic and Pragmatic Examination of the English Perfect. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Fournier, Nathalie
1998 Grammaire du Français Classique. Belin: Sup-Lettres.
Herwig, Rolf
1999 “
Changing Language in Changing Times”.
Anglistik und Englischunterricht 621: 223–50.
Hopper, Paul J. and Sandra A. Thompson
1980 “
Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse”.
Language 56 (2): 251–99.
Howe, Chad
2013 The Spanish Perfects: Pathways of Emergent Meaning. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Huddleston, Rodney
2002 “
The Verb”. In
Rodney Huddleston and
Geoffrey Pullum,
et al. (eds),
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, 71–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hundt, Marianne and Nicholas Smith
2009 “
The Present Perfect in British and American English: Has There Been Any Change, Recently?”
ICAME Journal 331: 45–63.
Iatridou, Sabine, Elena Anagnostopoulou and Roumyana Izvorsky
2003 “
Observations about the Form and Meaning of the Perfect”. In
Artemis Alexiadou,
Monika Rathert and
Arnim von Stechow (eds),
Perfect Explorations, 101–32. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Leech, Geoffrey
2003 “
Modal on the Move: The English Modal Auxiliaries 1961–1992”. In
Roberta Facchinetti,
Frank Palmer and
Manfred Krug (eds),
Modality in Contemporary English, 223–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith
2009 Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCawley, James D
1971 “
Tense and Time Reference in English”. In
Charles J. Fillmore and
D. Terrence Langendoen (eds),
Studies in Linguistic Semantics, 97–113. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
McCawley, James D
1981 “
Notes on the English Present Perfect”.
Australian Journal of Linguistics 11: 81–90.
McCoard, Robert W
1978 The English Perfect: Tense Choice and Pragmatic Inferences. Amsterdam: North-Holland Press.
Michaelis, Laura A
1994 “
The Ambiguity of the English Present Perfect”.
Journal of Linguistics 30 (1): 111–57.
Michaelis, Laura. A
1998 Aspectual Grammar and Past-Time Reference. London: Routledge.
Miller, Jim
2000 “
The Perfect in Spoken and Written English”.
Transactions of the Philological Society 98 (2): 323–52.
Myhill, John
1992 Typological Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nishiyama, Atsuko and Jean-Pierre Koenig
2010 “
What is a Perfect State?”
Language 86 (3): 611–45.
Poplack, Shana and Sali A. Tagliamonte
2001 African American English in the Diaspora: Tense and Aspect. Oxford: Blackwell.
Posner, Rebecca
1997 Linguistic Change in French. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Rastall, Paul
1999 “
Observations on the Present Perfect in English”.
World Englishes 18 (1): 79–83.
Ritz, Marie-Eve
2007 “
Perfect Change: Synchrony Meets Diachrony”. In
Joseph C. Salmons and
Shannon Dubenion-Smith (eds),
Historical Linguistics 2005. Selected Papers from the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 31 July – 5 August 2005
, 133–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ritz, Marie-Eve
2010 “
The Perfect Crime? Illicit Uses of the Present Perfect in Australian Police Media Releases”.
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (12): 3400–17.
Ritz, Marie-Eve and Dulcie Engel
2008 “
‘Vivid Narrative Use’ and the Meaning of the Present Perfect in Spoken Australian English”.
Linguistics 46 (1): 131–60.
Sankoff, David
1988 “
Sociolinguistics and Syntactic Variation”. In
Frederick J. Newmeyer (ed.),
Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, 140–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sankoff, David, Sali A. Tagliamonte and Eric Smith
2012 GOLDVARB X: A Multivariate Analysis Application for Macintosh and Windows. Available online at:
[URL] (accessed October 2012).
Schaden, Gerhard
2009 “
Present Perfects Compete”.
Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (2): 115–41.
Schudson, Michael
1978 Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books.
Schwenter, Scott A
1994 “
‘Hot news’ and the Grammaticalization of Perfects”.
Linguistics 32 (6): 995–1028.
Schwenter, Scott A. and Rena Torres Cacoullos
2008 “
Defaults and Indeterminacy in Temporal Grammaticalization: The ‘Perfect’ Road to Perfective”.
Language Variation and Change 20 (1): 1–39.
Tagliamonte, Sali A
2006 Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tagliamonte, Sali A
2012 Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ungerer, Friedrich
2002 “
When News Stories Are No Longer Stories: The Emergence of the Top-Down Structure in News Reports in English Newspapers”. In
Andreas Fischer,
Gunnel Tottie and
Hans M. Lehmann (eds),
Text Types and Corpora: Studies in Honour of Udo Fries, 91–104. Türbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Vendler, Zeno
1967 Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Visser, Fredericus Th
1973 An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Part 3, Second Half. Syntactical Units with Two and with More Verbs. Leiden: Brill.
Yao, Xinyue
2014 “
Developments in the Use of the English Present Perfect: 1750-Present”.
Journal of English Linguistics 42 (4): 1–23.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.