Article published In:
Languages in ContrastVol. 2:2 (1999) ► pp.255–277
Radio Talk
French and English perfects on air
It has often been observed that present perfect forms in English and French have quite differing functions. These perfects are considered here in a parallel description of English and French radio talk. An examination of talk shows and news bulletins in two corpora of the same length and from the same day illustrates some interesting points with regards to the use of the perfect in different genres, and the contrasting functions of the perfect in the two languages. It is concluded that radio talk is a collection of sub-genres within a single environmental context. Tense distribution and usage in each language is one element that contributes to this particular pattern.
Keywords: English/French, Radio talk, Perfects
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Carruthers, Janice
2006. Temps et oralité dans le conte oral. La linguistique Vol. 42:1 ► pp. 97 ff. 
CARRUTHERS, JANICE
2008. Annotating an oral corpus using the Text Encoding Initiative. Methodology, problems, solutions. Journal of French Language Studies 18:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Egan, Thomas & Hildegunn Dirdal
2017. Chapter 1. Lexis in contrast today. In Cross-linguistic Correspondences [Studies in Language Companion Series, 191], ► pp. 1 ff.
Elsness, Johan
2014. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English. In Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 63], ► pp. 81 ff.
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