The functional division between the PP and the SP tends to vary over time and cross- linguistically. Typological studies of tense-aspect systems in European languages (e.g.
Bybee & Dahl 1989; Bybee et al. 1994) have pointed to a grammaticalisation path of
‘resultative > anterior’, by which present-tense resultative constructions evolve into anteriors expressing the current relevance of past situations. In conformity with this grammaticalisation path, the Modern English PP has developed from a stative resulta- tive construction which dates back to the earliest written records of English. Initially the construction only combined with telic situations, or events, which are compatible
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comThe present perfect and the preterite in Australian English 249 with the meaning of transition to a result state.1 As a rule have was used with transitive verbs (as in I have my work finished), and be with intransitive verbs (as in He is gone).
The past participle acted as a complement of either the object (in intransitives) or the subject (in transitives), and its adjectival nature can be seen from the fact that it some- times inflected for agreement with the case, gender and number of the object/subject.
The have in the stative resultative have + past participle retained the lexical mean- ing of possession, and the past participle often occurred after the object. Example (1) is from Old English:
(1) …and we habbað Godes hus inne and ute clổtne berypte [inflected participle]
…and we have God’s houses inside and out completely despoiled
(Wulfstan’s Address, in Elsness 1997: 260)
The construction foregrounds the present despoiled state of God’s houses, while the event of despoiling God’s houses is backgrounded and is inferred from this state. With continued generalisation of meaning triggered by pragmatic mechanisms, the seman- tically specified present result state gradually gave way to an inference of current rel- evance, and the meaning of possession was lost. The construction began to express that a past situation is viewed from a present perspective and is perceived as relevant to, or connected with some aspects of the ongoing discourse. Consider example (2) in Carey’s (1994) Middle English data:
(2) Ye us habbeð ofte imaked wrað þer uore inne Rome ye beoð lað But you have often made us wrath, therefore in Rome you are odious
(Layamon’s Brut, in Carey 1994: 71)
Here the have + past participle construction can be analysed as an anterior, a marker of current relevance. The situation modified by ofte ‘often’ is interpreted as having occurred multiple times within a time span extending from a contextually determined past time to the speaker’s present – the ‘extended-now’ (McCoard 1978). Insofar as the speaker’s focus extended from the result state to certain inherent properties of the past situation (e.g. frequency), the construction entered into competition with the SP. The difference between the PP and the SP, or between an anterior and a past tense, is that the former, but not the latter, explicitly asserts current relevance. In a Reichenbachian
1. The term ‘event’ is used in this paper to refer to telic situations, or situations with inherent endpoints. The defining feature of an event is its inherent endpoint: if an event terminates before this point, it is simply not true that the event has occurred. The term ‘result state’ is used to refer to the state immediately following the culmination of an event, or what Parsons (1990) refers to as ‘target state’. Events are distinguished from atelic situations, which do not have inherent endpoints and therefore do not have result states.
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framework (Reichenbach 1947/1966), this difference is captured by different relation- ships between E (the event time) and R (the reference time): the PP has the meaning
‘E precedes R’, while the SP ‘E coincides with R’.
The semantic reanalysis of the resultative have + past participle construction as an anterior has implications for both its form and frequency. Gradually the past participle moved from a post-object position to a pre-object position (I have my work finished >
I have finished my work), a shift which Visser (1973: 2192) argues to have been com- pleted by the beginning of the Modern English period. Elsness’s (1997) corpus-based study reports a steady increase in the construction’s absolute textual frequency and in its frequency relative to that of the SP for the period from Old to Middle English. Like many other instances of semantic reanalysis, the process is reflected and underpinned by changes in the construction’s co-occurrence patterns with clausal elements. Com- paring a collection of Old and Middle English texts, Carey (1994) identified several major co-occurrence changes in this period, including increased use with atelic verbs, manner adverbials and temporal adverbials denoting the frequency and duration of the situation, all of which are compatible with a focus on the past situation as opposed to the present result state. The functional extension of have + past participle is also marked by an increase of co-occurring intransitive verbs, leading to a decline of the rival intransitive be + past participle, which survives only with a few verbs in contem- porary usage, as in He is gone and The sun is set (cf. Kytử 1997).
A cross-linguistically attested tendency is for anteriors to further evolve into past tenses or perfectives, a well-studied grammaticalisation process known as ‘aorist drift’
(Harris 1982). Over time, with the erosion of current relevance, constructions which previously expressed anterior meanings develop preterital or aoristic functions and are therefore used as narrative tenses. Consequently, past-referring SPs become restricted to formal registers. This is what has happened in many (varieties of) European lan- guages such as (Castilian) Spanish, (Northern) Italian, (Standard) French, German and Romanian (Bybee et al. 1994; Harris 1982). Consider example (3), taken from the French novel L’Étranger. The italicised French passé composés (avoir/être + past participle) are formally equivalent to the English PP, but are translated into English SPs. The English PP could not be used in the translation since it has not assumed the more grammaticalised past/perfective function that the French passé composé has, at least in Standard English.
(3) Il est sorti, est revenue, a disposé des chaises. Sur l’une d’elles, il a empilé des tasses autour d’une cafetière.
He went in and out, arranging chairs. On one of them he stacked some cups
round a coffee-pot. (In Swart 2007: 2283)
From a diachronic perspective, the English PP behaves quite differently from its cross-linguistic counterparts which are in the process of grammaticalising from
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comThe present perfect and the preterite in Australian English 251 anteriors to past tenses/perfectives. While these counterparts have normally undergone a rise in frequency, gaining a wider distribution as a result of the loosening of the current relevance constraint, corpus-based studies such as Elsness (1997) and Yao (2014) have shown that the frequency of the PP has in fact peaked in the 18th century and has been in decline ever since. The decline has been more significant in AmE than in BrE, with the consequence that the PP now occurs less frequently in Contemporary AmE than BrE (cf. Hundt & Smith 2009). In exploring functional explanations for the somewhat unexpected decline of the PP, Yao (2014) examined the co-occurrence patterns of the two verb forms with various clausal elements, based on BrE and AmE drama texts in A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). The study revealed several noteworthy tendencies, including that for the PP to co-occur more frequently than the SP with temporal specifiers, non-transitive verbs and negation. These tenden- cies were interpreted as signaling a shift in the nature of the PP’s current relevance, from the present persistence of the result state to a temporal connection between the past and the present, as highlighted by the extended-now interpretation (see further Section 5).
One question to be dealt with in the present study is whether the above tendencies can also be found in BrE and AmE fiction of the same period.
Regarding the PP in AusE, several studies have examined its distributional and functional variation across formal and informal registers and in standard and non- standard varieties. Using contemporary data from the International Corpus of English, Elsness (2009) and Yao & Collins (2012) found that the frequency of the PP in general AusE lies between that of BrE and AmE (although divergences from the two reference varieties were identified in the case of some registers). Collins & Yao (2014) is the first diachronic study to examine frequency change in real-time AusE data. Comparing fiction texts in A Corpus of Oz Early English (COOEE) and a 20th century AusE cor- pus (AusCorp), it establishes that AusE has been lagging behind BrE and AmE in the decline of the PP. What remain unexplored, and what will be examined in the present study, are signs of potential functional shifts that underlie the long-term frequency stability of the AusE PP.
Another concern that prompted the present study is that the PP has been found to exhibit functional extension in certain nonstandard varieties of contemporary AusE.
In a series of sociolinguistic studies (Engel & Ritz 2000; Ritz 2010; Ritz & Engel 2008), Engel and Ritz investigated tense/aspect marking in the narrative sections of Austra- lian police reports and popular ‘chat-show’ programs on several radio stations, reveal- ing that the PP sometimes appears in these registers as a narrative tense, a usage type that they refer to as the ‘vivid narrative’ PP. Examples (4a)–(4c) illustrate:
(4) a. I looked over my shoulder, he’s standing right behind me. He’s walked in, y’know the doors that separate the classrooms, he’s come in the one behind me, they all started laughing.
(Radio chat show, in Ritz & Engel 2008: 142)
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b. Whist the officer has returned to his motorcycle to conduct further inquiries, the male driver has allegedly reserved the car towards him and then driven off. The officer was forced to avoid being struck, and in doing so, has received minor injuries. (Police report, in Ritz 2009: 3406) c. At about 3.20 pm yesterday a man has entered the Eat-N-Run take away
store on golden Four Drive, Bilinga, armed with a rifle.
(Police report, in Ritz 2009: 3406)
What is noteworthy about these examples is the use of the PP to signal temporal pro- gression (either implicitly or explicitly with then) and to combine with the past-time adverbial at about 3.20 pm yesterday. The events are clearly understood to be part of a past time sphere disconnected from the narrator’s present. Engel and Ritz argue that the PP in these contexts functions in a similar way as the narrative present tense, ren- dering the description of past events more vivid. Comparing examples (4a)–(4c) with example (3) above, we see that the vivid narrative PP most approximates the function of the more grammaticalised French passé composé. Although it is normally consid- ered unacceptable in standard AusE (and is therefore unlikely to feature prominently in the type of printed, published texts examined this study), its attested nature in con- temporary Australian usage raises the possibility of a functional generalisation process that might have occurred at some earlier stage in this variety, especially if we take into account the AusE PP’s slow rate of frequency change, as reported by Collins & Yao (2014).