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.

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.

An historical analysis of species references in American English

Corpora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Craig Frayne
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Google Books

This study uses the two largest available American English language corpora, Google Books and the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), to investigate relations between ecology and language. The paper introduces ecolinguistics as a promising theme for corpus research. While some previous ecolinguistic research has used corpus approaches, there is a case to be made for quantitative methods that draw on larger datasets. Building on other corpus studies that have made connections between language use and environmental change, this paper investigates whether linguistic references to other species have changed in the past two centuries and, if so, how. The methodology consists of two main parts: an examination of the frequency of common names of species followed by aspect-level sentiment analysis of concordance lines. Results point to both opportunities and challenges associated with applying corpus methods to ecolinguistc research.

scholarly journals ENGLISH PERFECT IN COGNITION OF SLOVAK ISCED3 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH – PRELIMINARY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomáš Hlava
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Proficiency Test ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Procedural Knowledge ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Declarative Knowledge ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
The Past ◽  
English Language Instruction ◽  
Different Types

In English language instruction in Slovakia, a strong preference for declarative knowledge at the expense of procedural knowledge development has been reported over the last two decades. However, the cognitive aspects of language attainment predict no impact of instructional efforts, since mental representations of language to be attained are told to be supported by different cognitive systems than associative learning develops. Language variation materializes differences among languages based on differences in digitalizing the experience and thus understanding the world. For Slovak learners, the English present perfect is one such anomaly in categorization. This paper aims to answer what the specific interactions between past simple and present perfect are and how the predicted cognitive aspects of language attainment influence the use of different types of knowledge. A proficiency test focusing on declarative knowledge and language use without context and in context was distributed to 600 Slovak learners of English at the ISCED3a level. In Past simple conditions, students proved highly proficiency in all 3 types of tasks. In present perfect conditions, declarative knowledge strongly dominated over language use in context. In Present perfect conditions, substitutions by past simple were significantly more frequent than substitutions of present perfect by past simple. Cognitive funneling was recognized as a process inhibiting fast proceduralization of the English present perfect compared to fast and reliable proceduralization of the past simple.

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.

Predicting the past

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Trudgill ◽  
Elizabeth Gordon
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Southern Hemisphere ◽  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
American English ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
The Past ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
English Canadian

The division of the world’s Englishes into rhotic and non-rhotic types is clearly due to the fact that the former are conservative in not having undergone loss of non-prevocalic /r/, whereas the latter have. The beginnings of the loss of non-prevocalic /r/ in English have generally been dated by historians of the language to the 18th century. It is therefore obvious, and has been widely accepted, that Irish English, Canadian English, and American English are predominantly rhotic because the English language was exported to these colonial areas before the loss of rhoticity in England began; and that the Southern Hemisphere Englishes are non-rhotic because English was exported to these areas in the 19th century after the loss of rhoticity. Analysing newly-discovered data from Australia, we present some surprising evidence that shows that this obvious conclusion is incorrect.

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.

Be like and the quotative system of Jamaican English: Linguistic trajectories of globalization and localization

English Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ksenija Bogetić
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American English ◽  
New Form

One of the most striking linguistic changes to affect the English language in recent decades is the ongoing spread of be like, shown in (1), as a new member of the quotative system (Ferrara & Bell, 1995; Macaulay, 2001; Buchstaller & Van Alphen, 2012). The opportunity to study language change ‘in action’ (Tagliamonte & D'Arcy, 2004: 493) brought by this innovation has spurred a vast body of research on quotation in American English, where the new form is presumed to have originated (Ferrara & Bell, 1995).

scholarly journals Recent change in modality in informal spoken British English: 1990s–2010s

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-562
Author(s):  
ROBBIE LOVE ◽  
NIALL CURRY
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
British English ◽  
The Core ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries ◽  
Language Data ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Functional Analyses ◽  
Future Work

Studies in modality comprise a complex canon of functional, formal, sociological and diachronic analyses of language. The current understanding of how English language speakers use modality is unclear; while some research argues that core modal auxiliaries are in decline, they are reported as increasing elsewhere. A lack of contemporary and representative spoken language data has rendered it difficult to reconcile such differing perspectives. To address this issue, this article presents a diachronic study of modality using the Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken component of the BNC1994. We investigate the frequency of core modal auxiliaries, semi-modals, and lexical modality-indicating devices (MIDs), as well as the modal functions of the core modal auxiliaries, in informal spoken British English, between the 1990s and 2010s. The results of the analysis are manifold. We find that core modal auxiliaries appear to be in decline, while semi-modals and lexical MIDs appear relatively stable. However, on a form-by-form basis, there is significant evidence of both increases and decreases in the use of individual expressions within each modal set. As a result, this study problematises form-based studies of change, and illustrates the value and coherence that functional analyses of modality can afford future work.

scholarly journals TERMS OF DESIGNATION OF PERSONS IN JURIDICAL TERMINOLOGY OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN VARIANTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (193) ◽  
pp. 231-235
Author(s):  
Maryna Kizil ◽  
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
Old French ◽  
British English ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Procedures

The article is devoted to the research of Briitsh and American English juridical terms designating persons. This is the most numerous thematic group of juridical terms among others including terms designating different branches of law, terms denoting types of different insitutions of the sphere, types of legal documents, stages of legal procedures, procedural norms, types of crimes, offences, punishments in particular. The group of juridical terms designating persons is not homogeneous semantically. It consists of terms denoting representatives of different professions of the sphere, persons with assigned juridical rights or duties, criminals who break the law. Many of these terms have the same meanings in British and American variants of the English language. That is why they are called equivalent for both variants. Most of these terms are of Franco-Latin origin, as they were borrowed from Latin into Old French and from it into Middle and New English. So they appeared in the British English and penetrated into American one later. Some terms in the analyzed thematic group have synonymous or nearly synonymous meanings represented by different forms in British and American variants of the English language. The analyzed group also comprises other types of terms. Such terms are not equal in meanings or their shades. That is why they are called non-equivalent terms for analyzed variants of the English language. The categorial semes of their meanings are the same or practically the same in both variants. The differential semes of meanings of these terms can differ not only qualitatively, but also quantitavely. Their quality reveals in the shades of meanings or their differences. Quantitative differences reveal in widening of the denotative meaning of the term in one variant of the English language (British or American) and its narrowing in another variant correspondently. Most of non-equivalent terms from the analyzed thematic group have nationally marked semes. Such semes reveal and characterize national and cultural peculiarities of the development of British and American legal and juridical system somehow.

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