They have published a new cultural policy that just come out: competing forms in spoken and written New Englishes

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the variation found in the forms used to express present perfect meaning in spoken and written East and South-East Asian Englishes, those from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and India, as represented in the ICE (International Corpus of English) corpora. A preliminary analysis of three million words of these spoken New Englishes (using a parallel corpus of British English as a benchmark corpus) reveals the use of different variants in contexts where Present-day Standard British English favours the presence of have + past participle (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 143), namely contexts in which recent past is expressed using just, experiential meaning with ever and never, and resultative meaning with yet (Suarez-Gomez and Seoane 2011; cf. also Miller 2000: 327-331). In this paper we gauge the impact of this variation in written New Englishes in the same contexts, in order to identify the differences between spoken and written modes of production in the expression of the perfect, as compared to spoken and written British English, and to see the extent to which the alternative forms found in spoken New Englishes have spread to written New Englishes. The results show that such alternative forms also occur in the written language, and thus confirm a structural change, since they would represent consolidated variants within the perfect paradigm in these Asian Englishes.