Cover not available
Part of
Grammatical Change in English World-Wide
Edited by Peter Collins
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 67] 2015
► pp. 247–268

The present perfect and the preterite in Australian English

A diachronic perspective

ORCID logo | Renmin University of China
The present study explores diachronic shifts in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Australian English. Research on British and American English has shown that the present perfect has lost ground to the preterite since the 18th century, a process underpinned by the weakening of the present perfect’s association with resultative contexts and the strengthening of its association with non-resultative, ‘extended-now’ contexts. The changes identified in Australian English by this study are strongly indicative of the above functional shift, but are less remarkable in degree and range than in British English, and even less than in American English. Keywords: Australian English; present perfect; preterite; diachronic change
Published online: 24 February 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.67.11yao
References (55)
References
Aaron, Jessi E. 2010. Pushing the envelope: Looking beyond the variable context. Language Variation and Change 22(1): 1–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Finegan, Edward. 2001. Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In Variation in English: Multi-dimensional Studies, Susan Conrad & Douglas Biber (eds), 200–214. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Binnick, Robert I. 1991. Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laura J. 1994. The differentiation of statives and perfects in Early Modern English: The development of the conclusive perfect. In Towards a Standard English 1600–1800, Dieter Stein & Ingrid Tieken Boon van Ostade (eds), 135–170. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Dahl, östen. 1989. The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages of the World. Studies in Language 13(1): 51–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Pagliuca, William. 1987. The evolution of future meaning. In Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 48], Anna Giacalone Ramat, Onofrio Carruba & Giuliano Bernini (eds), 109–122. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere & Pagliuca, William. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Carey, Kathleen. 1994. Pragmatics, Subjectivity, and the Grammaticalization of the English Perfect. PhD dissertation. University of California, San Diego.
Collins, Peter. 2014. Quasi-modals and modals in Australian English fiction 1800-1999, with comparisons across British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics 42(1): 7–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Peter & Blair, David. 2001. Language and identity in Australia. In English in Australia [Varieties of English around the World G26], David Blair & Peter Collins (eds), 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Peter & Peters, Pam. 2004. Australian English: Morphology and syntax. In A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax, Bernd Kortmann, Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, Edgar W. Schneider & Clive Upton (eds), 593–610. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Collins, Peter & Yao, Xinyue. 2014. Grammatical change in the verb phrase in Australian English: A corpus-based study. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34(4): 496–514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Copple, Mary T. 2011. Tracking the constraints on a grammaticalizing perfect (ive). Language Variation and Change 23(2): 163–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davydova, Julia. 2008. Preterite and present perfect in Irish English: Determinants of variation. Universität Hamburg, Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit 84.Google Scholar
. 2011. The Present Perfect in Non-native Englishes: A Corpus-based Study of Variation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Delbridge, Arthur. 2001. Lexicography and national identity: The Australian experience. In English in Australia [Varieties of English around the World G26], David Blair & Peter Collins (eds), 303–316. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elsness, Johan. 1997. The Perfect and the Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. The present perfect and the preterite in Australian and New Zealand English. Peters, Collins & Smith (eds), 89–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Engel, Dulcie & Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2000. The use of the present perfect in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20(2): 119–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fritz, Clemens W.A. 2007. From English in Australia to Australian English, 1788-1900. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Harris, Martin. 1982. The ‘past simple’ and ‘present perfect’ in Romance. In Studies in the Romance Verb, Martin Harris & Nigel Vicent (eds), 42–70. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Horvath, Barbara. 1985. Variation in Australian English: The Sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticalization. In Approaches to Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 19], Elizabeth C. Traugott & Bernd Heiner (eds), 17–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently? ICAME Journal 33: 45–63.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel E. 2009. Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1): 359–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kytö, Merja. 1997. Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitives from Late Middle to Modern English. In English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles, Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö & Kirsi Heikkonen (eds), 18–85. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCoard, Robert W. 1978. The English Perfect: Tense Choice and Pragmatic Inferences. Amsterdam: North-Holland Press.Google Scholar
McGregor, Craig. 1980. The Australian People. Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton.Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam & Niedzielski, Nancy. 2003. The globalization of vernacular variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 534–555. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Jim. 2000. The perfect in spoken and written English. Transactions of the Philological Society 98(2): 323–352. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2004. Perfect and resultative constructions in spoken and non-standard English. In Up and Down the Cline: The Nature of Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds), 229–246. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Alexander & Delbridge, Arthur. 1965. The Speech of Australian Adolescents. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English: A Study in Subatomic Semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT press.Google Scholar
Peters, Pam, Collins, Peter & Smith, Adam. 2009. Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English [Varieties of English around the World G39]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolf, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey N., & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ramson, William. 1966. Australian English: An Historical Study of the Vocabulary, 1788-1898. Canberra: Australian National University Press.Google Scholar
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947/1966. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York NY: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2009. The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases. Journal of Pragmatics 42(12): 3400–3417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ritz, Marie-Eve & Engel, Dulcie. 2008. “Vivid narrative use” and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English. Linguistics 46(1): 131–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2008. Defaults and indeterminacy in temporal grammaticalization: The ‘perfect’ road to perfective. Language Variation and Change 20(1): 1–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seoane, Elena, & Suárez-Gómez, Cristina. 2013. The expression of the perfect in East and South-East Asian Englishes. English World-Wide 34(1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Swart, Henriëtte. 2007. A cross-linguistic discourse analysis of the Perfect. Journal of Pragmatics 39(12): 2273–2307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2000. The grammaticalization of the present perfect in English: Tracks of change and continuity in a linguistic enclave. In Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English [Studies in Language Companion Series 53], Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds), 329–354. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact, Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Turner, George. 1966. The English language in Australia and New Zealand. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Van Herk, Gerard. 2008. Letter perfect: The present perfect in early African American correspondence. English World-Wide 29(1): 45–69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Aspect and the English present perfect: What can be coded? In Aspect in Grammatical Variation [Studies in Language Variation 6], James A. Walker (ed), 49–64. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Verbs and times. In Linguistics and Philosophy, Zeno Vendler (ed), 97–121. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Visser, Fredericus Theodorus. 1973. An Historical Syntax of the English Language 3/2: Syntactical Units with Two and with More Verbs. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Yao, Xinyue. 2014. Developments in the use of the English present perfect: 1750-present. Journal of English Linguistics 42(4): 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yao, Xinyue & Collins, Peter. 2012. The present perfect in world Englishes. World Englishes 31(3): 386–403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Collins, Peter
2023. Grammatical variation in World Englishes. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 44:2 ► pp. 184 ff. DOI logo
Collins, Peter & Xinyue Yao
2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43:1 ► pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
Frazier, Stefan & Hahn Koo
2018. Discourse-pragmatic functions of the present perfect in American English TV and radio interviews . Text & Talk 39:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Yao, Xinyue
2016. The evolution of the “hot news” perfect in English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17:1 ► pp. 129 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 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.