The present perfect in Nigerian English

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
VALENTIN WERNER ◽  
ROBERT FUCHS
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Internal Variability ◽  
Alternative Measure ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
British English ◽  
Determining Factors ◽  
Substrate Influence

This article offers an analysis of present perfect (PP) use in Nigerian English (NigE), based on the Nigerian component of theInternational Corpus of English(ICE). First, we analyze variable contexts with the Simple Past (PT; determined by temporally specified contexts) as one of the main competitors of the PP, and thus assess the PP-friendliness of NigE in contrast to other varieties. We further provide an alternative measure of PP-friendliness and test register effects in terms of normalized and relative PP and PT frequencies. Our results indicate an overall reduced PP-friendliness of NigE and show internal variability in terms of PP frequencies in different variable contexts. As regards register effects, NigE does not show less variability of PP frequencies compared to British English (BrE). However, the distribution of the PP across registers in NigE does not follow the British pattern where certain registers are particularly PP-friendly. We discuss potential determining factors of the low frequency of the PP in NigE, and conclude that neither substrate influence nor general learning mechanisms on their own can comprehensively account for it. Instead, we suggest that historical influence from Irish and perhaps (at a later point) American English, in conjunction with general learning mechanisms, may be responsible.

Recent change in non-present perfect constructions in British and American English

Corpora ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyue Yao ◽  
Peter Collins
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

scholarly journals The pluperfect in native and non-native English: A comparative corpus study

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devyani Sharma
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Multidimensional Distribution ◽  
British English

One of the challenges in characterizing non-native varieties of English is accounting for variant uses of ostensibly standard English forms. The present corpus study examines both quantitative and qualitative aspects of pluperfect use in Indian English (IndE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE). IndE is found to differ from native usage by associating had + V-ed with present perfect and preterite meanings. Licensing of pluperfect contexts by time adverbials is also found to be significantly lower in IndE. AmE shows the lowest overall use of the pluperfect and the highest use of disambiguating adverbials. Thus, AmE and IndE show distinct patterns of divergence from BrE. Variation within IndE exhibits a tendency for greater non-nativeness in regional (vs. national) press and in bureaucratic (vs. press) registers, suggesting a multidimensional distribution of IndE nonstandardness in India. These nonstandard uses are shown to convey new pragmatic meanings deriving from ambiguity in the native system and reinforcement from substrate languages. Finally, these changes are evaluated in relation to the broader tense–modality–aspect system of IndE as well as those of other non-native Englishes which exhibit similar characteristics.

Description and explanation in the acquisition of verb-forms

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
American English ◽  
Considerable Variability ◽  
Apparent Discrepancy ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Verb Forms

ABSTRACTResearch on the learning of verb-forms in English has consistently reported the late acquisition of the PRESENT PERFECT. Explanations for this have been in terms of children's cognitive abilities. Difficulties are presented for such explanations by an apparent discrepancy between American English (AE) and British English (BE) acquisition data. This paper examines in detail the forms included in the PRESENT PERFECT paradigm, and the use of these and related forms by a sample of BE children aged 3; 3. While there is considerable variability across the sample, the results indicate that BE children at this age have not in any sense mastered the present perfect. The implications of this are discussed.

British-American Contrasts in the Use of the Past Perfect: Negotiating Ambiguity versus Redundancy?

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-319
Author(s):  
Stephanie Kleppel ◽  
Matthias Eitelmann ◽  
Britta Mondorf
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American English ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Past ◽  
Distribution Studies ◽  
The Cost

Abstract The present study provides an empirical analysis of British-American contrasts in the overall use of the past perfect as well as its functional distribution. Studies on variation according to national variety report a decline of the past perfect spearheaded by American English (cf. Elsness, J. 1997. The Perfect and Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English (Topics in English Linguistics 21). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyte; Bowie, J., S. Wallis, and B. Aarts. 2013. “The Perfect in Spoken British English.” In The Verb Phrase in English. Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, edited by B. Aarts, J. Close, G. Leech, and S. Wallis, 318–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 348; Yao, X., and P. Collins. 2013. “Recent Change in Non-present Perfect Constructions in British and American English.” Corpora 8 (1): 115–35: 121f.). However, these findings still await an explanation as to possible motivations for the decline. The present study is able to provide novel insights by taking the semantic functions of past perfect structures into account (anteriority, backshifting in indirect speech, hypothetical past). A functional quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspaper corpora comprising 112 million words (27 million British English and 85 million American English) reveals that the overall decline results in a reduction of redundant information at the cost of potential ambiguity. Finally, our findings will be related to the four dichotomies of British-American differences outlined in Rohdenburg and Schlüter (2009 “New Departures.” In One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English (Studies in English Language), edited by G. Rohdenburg, and J. Schlüter, 364–423. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 421), i.e. progressiveness, formality, consistency and explicitness.

scholarly journals The Present Perfect and Preterite in British and American English

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Katarina Dea Žetko
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
British English ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Major Factors ◽  
Significant Factors

The objective of our article is to present the selected results of the research which was conducted for the purpose of our master’s thesis. We focused on the transfer of the functions of the present perfect into the domain of the preterite in informal British and American English. We put together a British and an American corpus and analysed the differences and similarities between British and American English in this transfer. We examined some factors that may influence this transfer either in American or British English, or in both varieties. The major factors will be presented in this article. The results show that the differences between both varieties mostly occur in the frequency of this transfer. Moreover, in American English there are more significant factors than in British English. Nevertheless, we can observe that the general tendency is the same in both varieties. This fact may indicate that this phenomenon, which was first noticed in informal American English, is spreading to informal British English.

The Norm Orientation of English in the Caribbean

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Dagmar Deuber ◽  
Stephanie Hackert ◽  
Eva Canan Hänsel ◽  
Alexander Laube ◽  
Mahyar Hejrani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
American English ◽  
Media Exposure ◽  
Quantitative Investigation ◽  
British English ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Newspaper Writing ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Do So

This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural links. We present a quantitative investigation of variable features comparing our Caribbean results not just to American and British reference corpora but also to newspaper collections from India and Nigeria as representatives of non-Caribbean New Englishes. The amount of American features employed varies by type of feature and country. In all Caribbean corpora, they are more prevalent in the lexicon than in spelling. With regard to grammar, an orientation toward a singular norm cannot be deduced from the data. While Caribbean journalists do partake in worldwide American-led changes such as colloquialization, as evident in the occurrence of contractions or the tendency to prefer that over which, the frequencies with which they do so align neither with American English nor with British English but often resemble those found in the Indian and Nigerian corpora. Contemporary Caribbean newspaper writing, thus, neither follows traditional British norms, nor is it characterized by massive linguistic Americanization; rather, there appears to be a certain conservatism common to New Englishes generally. We discuss these results in light of new considerations on normativity in English in the 21st century.

scholarly journals The Use of American and British Lexis in Brunei English

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Mohamad Nur Raihan
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
School Students ◽  
British English ◽  
Recorded Data ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Power Point ◽  
Casual Speech ◽  
University Undergraduates ◽  
Age Range

In pronunciation, influenced by American English, a shift in Brunei English can be observed in the increasing use of [r] in tokens such as car and heard particularly among younger speakers whose pronunciation may be influenced by American English. In contrast, older speakers tend to omit the [r] sound in these tokens as their pronunciation may be more influenced by British English. However, it is unclear whether American English has influenced the vocabulary of Brunei English speakers as the education system in Brunei favours British English due to its historical ties with Britain. This paper analyses the use of American and British  lexical items between three age groups: 20 in-service teachers aged between 29 to 35 years old, 20 university undergraduates aged between 19 to 25 years old, and 20 secondary school students who are within the 11 to 15 age range. Each age group has 10 female and 10 male participants and they were asked to name seven objects shown to them on Power point slides. Their responses were recorded and compared between the age groups and between female and male data. The analysis is supplemented with recorded data from interviews with all 60 participants to determine instances of American and British lexical items in casual speech. It was found that there is a higher occurrence of American than British lexical items in all three groups and the interview data supports the findings in the main data. Thus, providing further evidence for the Americanisation of Brunei English and that Brunei English is undergoing change.

scholarly journals Indirectness in the Age of Globalization: A Social Network Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 930-949
Author(s):  
Marina Terkourafi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American English ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Network Ties ◽  
British English ◽  
Theoretical Predictions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self

Indirectness has traditionally been viewed as commensurate with politeness and attributed to the speaker’s wish to avoid imposition and/or otherwise strategically manipulate the addressee. Despite these theoretical predictions, a number of studies have documented the solidarity-building and identity-constituting functions of indirectness. Bringing these studies together, Terkourafi 2014 proposed an expanded view of the functions of indirect speech, which crucially emphasizes the role of the addressee and the importance of network ties. This article focuses on what happens when such network ties become loosened, as a result of processes of urbanization and globalization. Drawing on examples from African American English and Chinese, it is argued that these processes produce a need for increased explicitness, which drives speakers (and listeners) away from indirectness. This claim is further supported diachronically, by changes in British English politeness that coincide with the rise of the individual Self. These empirical findings have implications for im/politeness theorizing and theory-building more generally, calling attention to how the socio-historical context of our research necessarily influences the theories we end up building.

scholarly journals Orientations towards English among English-medium Instruction Students

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Karakaş
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
American English ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
English Medium Instruction

Abstract Based on the empirical data of my PhD research, this paper analyses the perceptions of 351 undergraduate students enrolled at English-medium universities towards English in terms of the language ideology framework. The students were purposively sampled from three programs at three Turkish universities. The data were drawn from student opinion surveys and semi-structured interviews. The findings paint a blurry picture, with a strong tendency among most students to view their English use as having the characteristics of dominant native varieties of English (American English & British English), and with a high percentage of students’ acceptance of the distinctiveness of their English without referring to any standard variety. The findings also show that many students’ orientations to English are formed by two dominant language ideologies: standard English ideology and native speaker English ideology. It was also found that a large number of students did not strictly stick to either of these ideologies, particularly in their orientation to spoken English, due, as argued in the main body, to their experiences on language use that have made them aware of the demographics of diverse English users and of the diverse ways of using English.

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