The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases

Abstract

This paper examines extensions in present perfect (PP) usage in a corpus of police media reports published on the web in Australia, following previous work on extensions in the uses of the PP in oral narratives ( Engel and Ritz, 2000; Ritz, 2007; Ritz and Engel, 2008). The following were examined: proportion of tenses in the corpus, lexical aspect of VPs, co-occurrences of the PP with temporal adverbials, and discourse characteristics. The latter were the main focus of the paper, and patterns in PP usage in relation to rhetorical and information structures were examined in detail. The results show that PP clauses are almost as frequent as simple past clauses; that the PP appears frequently in sequences expressing temporal progression, and that it is often combined with a range of adverbials, including past dates and times. It is also argued that police usage of the PP can be seen to give rise to mirative effects, with consequences at the level of discourse usage. In particular, the PP is favoured for introduction of new/unexpected discourse information, while the SP is used in-between clauses in the PP to continue a sub-segment. I use and extend Caudal and Roussarie's (2006) viewpoint analysis of perfects that have acquired perfective past meanings as well as Vikner's (1985) three two-place relations system for the representation of tenses, and propose that the non-standard PP in Australian English can be represented as having a result stage filling a temporal interval between a past reference time and a present one, the extended-now. I suggest that such an interval is exploited to give rise to various meanings and discourse effects.