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