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Part of
The Perfect Volume: Papers on the perfect
Edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd
[Studies in Language Companion Series 217] 2021
► pp. 461–478

Chapter 18
The functions of the auxiliary ‘have’ in Australian English vivid narratives

| The University of Western Australia
| The University of Western Australia

The present chapter builds on earlier work showing that the Present Perfect (PP) in Australian English (AusE) narratives and police media reports has acquired some of the functions of the Simple Past (SP). It focuses more specifically on subject-auxiliary ellipsis in sequences of non-standard PP clauses with the aim of better understanding auxiliary scope in such segments. Our data are taken from three corpora of oral narratives and one corpus of written media reports. We argue that the auxiliary, in its full or cliticized form, serves as a marker of saliency, highlighting a speaker’s subjectivity, and that it has acquired discourse segmenting functions for some speakers. Both increased subjectivity and widening of scope are consistent with principles of semantic change.

Keywords: present perfect, Australian English, semantic change, grammaticalisation, narrative tense, subject-auxiliary ellipsis, non-standard past, discourse marking, intersubjectivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The PP in Australian English
    • 2.2Non-standard participles and past forms in English varieties
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Description of corpora
    • 3.2Analysis of verb forms in clauses with elided subject following a non-standard PP clause
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.18rit
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Howe, Chad
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