Changing English

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Anna Mauranen, Svetlana Vetchinnikova, Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Anna Mauranen, Svetlana Vetchinnikova

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110429763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines the special nature of English both as a global and a local language, focusing on some of the ongoing changes and on the emerging new structural and discoursal characteristics of varieties of English. Although it is widely recognised that processes of language change and contact bear affinities, for example, to processes observable in second-language acquisition and lingua franca use, the research into these fields has so far not been sufficiently brought into contact with each other. The articles in this volume set out to combine all these perspectives in ways that give us a better understanding of the changing nature of English in the modern world.

IIOngoing changes in Englishes around the globe

Valentin Werner

The Present Perfect as a core feature of World Englishes25

Valentin Werner, University of Bamberg

Abstract: This paper presents central results from a larger corpus-based project (see Werner 2013a; 2013b; 2014) that investigates the usage of the Present Perfect (HAVE + past participle) across World Englishes. It aims at complementing other empirical studies which merely focus on differences between British and American English or which investigate the alternation of the Present Perfect with other time-reference forms.

Findings are based on material from the International Corpus of English (ICE), which has been annotated for various language-internal factors (such as semantics, preceding tense, etc.), so that the distributions and the relative importance of these factors can be analyzed. I employ explorative aggregative methods to find measures of similarity between the various varieties of English under investigation. In addition, this approach allows a systematic investigation of the influence of language-external variables (such as text types, variety types, geographical location) across all varieties. Furthermore, a case study on evidence of an allegedly extended functional range of the Present Perfect in terms of tense-like usage is presented.

The data reveal (i) that the Present Perfect can be seen as a globalized or core feature of world-wide varieties of English, and (ii) that geographical location, variety types, mode of discourse, genres and text types only have a weak effect when associations between varieties are explored; significant groupings across all varieties appear along register lines, however. The case study shows that creative usage in terms of a functional extension of the Present Perfect occurs in the ICE data, albeit largely restricted to informal speech in L1 varieties and to L2 varieties, where influence from both the substrate and through learner language is highly likely. The case study further exemplifies layering between the Present Perfect and its competitor, the Simple Past, in indefinite temporal environments.

Keywords: Present Perfect, Simple Past, involved vs. informational text type, American English (AmE), British English (BrE), International Corpus of English (ICE), L1 varieties, L2 varieties, aggregative analysis, cluster analysis, phylogenetic networks, NeighborNet

1Introduction

The Present Perfect (henceforth PrPf), both in its standard version HAVE + past participle and in alternative surface constructions with a similar function usage (which will not feature in this analysis),26 has been among the most frequently discussed issues of English grammar. While earlier research labeled it a “somewhat inconvenient case” (Bauer 1970: 189; see also Labov 1978: 13), 40 years on – and notwithstanding the bulk of literature on the subject (on which see further below and Klein 2009: 54) – the general situation does not seem to have changed, as the PrPf still “eludes a convincing analysis” (Veloudis 2003: 385). I will briefly summarize the main areas of dispute.

A first point that seems difficult is to assign the PrPf to one of the established grammatical classes. To illustrate this point, I will use the categorization approaches as developed in influential descriptive reference grammars of English (see also Werner 2013a). The two relevant approaches as contained in Quirk et al. (1985), Biber et al. (1999), and Huddleston and Pullum (2002) use different kinds of workarounds to achieve an elegant description, which, in turn, leads to inconsistencies in the overall models proposed. For instance, Huddleston and Pullum (2002) label the PrPf a “primary present” and “secondary perfect tense”, but state at the same time that “past” and “perfect” form the umbrella category of “past tense” (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Grammatical categories (= verbal systems) as represented by Huddleston and Pullum (2002); adapted from Werner (2014)

Moreover, some of the grammars listed apply a purely form-based approach. The only reason why the PrPf does not qualify as tense, as is the case in the Quirkian grammar (shown in Figure 2; similarly in Biber et al. 1999), for example, is that tense is taken to be realized morphologically, while aspect is realized syntactically (hence the “morphemic boundary” between the two grammatical classes and the categorization of the PrPf as aspect in this second set of grammars; see further Section 3.2 below).

Figure 2: Grammatical categories as represented by Quirk et al. (1985)27 and Biber et al. (1999); adapted from Werner (2014)

In addition to the analyses in descriptive grammars, a range of theoretical literature on the subject exists, largely revolving around the following topics:

–The PrPf as a grammatical category: tense vs. aspect views vs. further labels, such as “phase” or “status” (see e.g. Bauer 1970; Salkie 1989; Jaszczolt 2009);

–Semantic (and pragmatic) interpretation of the form (see e.g. McCawley 1983; Portner 2003);

–Compositionality of the form (see e.g. Klein 1992; Kortmann 1995).

While all of these works have their merits, some of their inherent weaknesses need to be exposed. First, with regard to semantic readings, depending on the individual author, between one and seven possible interpretations are given and often cross-classifications are possible. Second, another limitation that applies to both descriptive grammars and theoretical treatments of the PrPf alike is that they restrict their focus to a standard variety of British and, less often, American English. Third, many of the models presented are based on introspective analyses and constructed example sentences (but cf. Biber et al. 1999).

Starting with Elsness’s (1997) pioneering investigation, however, a few corpus-based studies (e.g. Wynne 2000; Schlüter 2002; Hundt and Smith 2009) have overcome the latter difficulty by relying on authentic language data, and have presented quantitative views of the PrPf. Still, while these works have laid the groundwork for the present and other follow-up corpus studies, I would like to argue that they leave some room for improvement. First, some of them apply the semantic models criticized for being based on mere introspection (see above); second, their conclusions partly rely on small and unbalanced corpus material, as has been noted earlier by Schlüter (2006) and Gries (2006), for instance; and third, the majority of the analyses is again restricted to British and American data. Even though the study of World Englishes has been established as a subfield of English linguistics for an extended period now, further varieties (of different types) have been considered in recent years only. Within this area, a distinction between studies focusing on the alternation of the PrPf with other time reference forms, notably the Simple Past (e.g. Davydova 2011, 2016; Yao and Collins 2012; Seoane and Suárez-Gómez 2013; Suárez-Gómez and Seoane 2013; Werner 2013b; see also the contributions in Werner, Seoane and Suárez-Gómez 2016), and within more general “inner life” analyses of the PrPf that consider contextual factors (e.g. Werner 2014) can be drawn. In the present paper, I seek to further extend the empirical perspective on the PrPf within the scope of various World Englishes. Another aspect that the present study will focus on is the systematic inclusion of text type and register – a topic that has been ignored in most analyses as yet to date.

Within the scope of this paper, I will tackle the following issues:

–Is the PrPf a core feature of World Englishes (in terms of overlap between varieties in the distributions of contextual factors) or is nativization (in terms of divergence) observable?

–Along which dimensions (e.g. geographical location, variety types) does variation occur?

–Is there evidence for effects of register, genre or text types within and across varieties?

–Do the data contain evidence of leveling between the PrPf and the Simple Past (SPst) and does this carry implications for the overall grammatical status of the PrPf?

After presenting an outline of the data and the methodology in Section 2, I will show one approach toward relating overlap and divergence of PrPf usage in different varieties in Section 3. This section has two subparts. The first one comprises a global perspective and focuses on text type effects (using aggregative methods). The second part represents a case study. It explores what corpus data from World Englishes can reveal about the grammatical status of the PrPf (see above) and its potential future development (using a predominantly qualitativ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of contents
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction Changing English: global and local perspectives
• I Towards the study of Global English
• II Ongoing changes in Englishes around the globe
• III Expanding the horizons: lingua franca, cognitive, and contact-linguistic perspectives
• Subject index
• Languages and Varieties index
• Author index