Stories Down Under: Tense Variation at the Heart of Australian English Narratives

Abstract

We examine tense variation in the complicating portion of unreflecting narratives of past personal experience in Australian English (AusE). Previous research has shown that the simple past tense (PT), historical present (HP) and historical present perfect (HPP) alternate innovatively in performed AusE narratives, enabling speakers to foreground pivotal events in the story. However, little is known about the sociolinguistic factors constraining tense variation more generally. Foregrounding is mostly performed by the HP in American English and by the HP and the HPP amongst working class London preteens. We provide a multivariate analysis of the sociolinguistic factors contributing to tense choice in the complicating clauses of 100 narratives of past personal experience collected in Perth in 2011/2012 and told by 38 high school- and university-educated native speakers of Anglo-Celtic AusE, aged 12–62. Multivariate analysis using Goldvarb X reveals that the PT is consistently favoured in complicating action clauses, as per its unmarked function in narrative, while the HPP is used minimally (1% (9/678)). Foregrounding in our narrative corpus is significantly constrained by speaker age. The PT dominates in the 36–62 cohort (89%). The HP is significantly favoured with quotative verbs by speakers aged 12–28 (0.66). Our cross-generational results indicate that AusE narrative style has undergone significant changes in line with Rodríguez Louro's contentions on the reorganization of the AusE quotative system. Namely, the rise of quotation amongst youth (notably the upsurge of quotative be like) is crucially intertwined with the use of the HP to foreground pivotal events in conversational narrative. The apparent time perspective afforded by our methodology shows that the HP has systematically encroached on AusE story-telling.