American English Perfect Construction Across Registers

Abstract

Perfect construction of English changes continually, and the emergence of various corpora has made it possible for researchers to study language changes in a quantitative way. Studying language changes from the perspective of a particular aspect is usually quite fruitful, but most of the studies in the area of concern in this paper have focused only on British English, or spoken register. To fill some gaps in this area, this quantitative study aims to elucidate the influence of different registers in the recent changes of perfect construction in American English. This study is based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the largest and balanced corpus of American English. Raw materials of over 450 million words from 1990 to 2012 were processed. The frequencies in all four categories of perfect (present perfect, past perfect, non-finite perfect, and infinitival perfect) and in each of the five registers (spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic) were calculated, and processed through a linear regression model and chi-square test. A decreasing trend in using perfect construction is identified through data analysis. The main contributor to this decreasing trend is present perfect in spoken, magazine, and academic. There is no significant change in the newspaper register while fiction exhibits a significant increase in perfect construction, contributed by large proportions of past perfect. The results are suggestive of the role that the registers play in the recent development of the perfect construction of English.