Temporal adverbials and the present perfect/past tense alternation

Abstract

Specification by certain temporal adverbials has been shown to be one of the typical triggers of the present perfect in British English. Often, however, L2 varieties display different patterns of temporal co-occurrence, especially using the simple past tense. This study is based on corpus data from twelve components of the International Corpus of English and analyzes the distribution between present perfect and past tense for a number of co-occurring temporal adverbials. In addition, it establishes three measures of similarity across the varieties (hierarchical cluster analysis, phylogenetic networks and a distribution-based measure). On the basis of 6 353 adverbials in total, this paper suggests (1) that there is a L1-L2 divide, (2) that the difference between "traditional" and "transplanted" L1 varieties is less pronounced, (3) that L2 varieties allow more variation, which indicates that in these varieties, the present perfect is partly used as a tense (sensu Quirk et al. 1985), and (4) that some temporal adverbials are less categorically attached to either present perfect or past tense than others. Finally, some conclusions with regard to the importance of geographical and socio-cultural proximity of certain varieties can be drawn.

Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

“…This absence of progress in the standardisation of this variety prompted Mukherjee (2007) to assert that IndE has entered a 'steady state' in its development as an indigenised variety of English, with progressive forces (emergence and use of indigenised endonormative language structures) and conservative forces (insistence on upholding exonormative BrE standards) balancing each other out. This includes lexical focus marking (Balasubramanian 2009a,b;Parviainen and Fuchs 2015;Sedlatschek 2009), topicalisation, dislocation and clefts , use of determiners (Davydova 2012;Sedlatschek 2009;Sharma 2005b), verb complementation (Hoffmann andMukherjee 2007;Koch and Bernaisch 2013;Mukherjee 2010;Mukherjee and Hoffmann 2006;Mukherjee and Schilk 2008;Schilk 2011), extension of the progressive (Collins 2008;Davydova 2012;Sharma 2009), use of past tense and present perfect (Davydova 2011;Fuchs 2016/to appear;Sharma 2009;Werner 2013), use of intensifiers (Fuchs and Gut 2016/to appear) and copula omission (Sharma 2009). Even if some Indians grow up speaking English, making them native speakers in the linguistic sense of the term, attitudes to IndE cause many Indians to deny that it can be their 'mother tongue'.…”

The present perfect in Irish English

“…For other Irish speakers, written English became a learned L2, accompanied by a rich ideology about forms and conventions, which they aspired to emulate, but among which, as this study of the perfect(ive) equivalents shows, many Irish forms, constructions and functions slipped in. For Werner (, ), the key to unravelling the perfect system rests with the relative specificity of temporal adverbs against which present and past tense and present perfect uses are then related and can be measured. For Seoane and Suárez‐Gómez () the key is unravelling the set of semantic functions of the perfective and comparing their realisation between present perfects and the present and past tenses.…”

“…This may be the result of the alternative Irish variants. An approach to the present perfect is to consider its collocation with certain temporal‐harmonic adverbs which are thought typically to co‐occur with perfective meanings (Werner , ). Such investigations are easily enabled by a well‐balanced corpus such as ICE‐Ireland.…”

The Present Perfect Has Only Gone And Changed, Hasn’t It? The Continuing Divergence of the Narrative Perfect

“…The narrative perfect, it has also been shown, has a particular geographical spread, being present in Australian and New Zealand English, as well as across the whole of the British Isles (Walker 2012), and elsewhere due to learner effects (Werner 2013). This much is clear.…”