Present Perfect Research Articles

The present perfect in Nigerian English

This article offers an analysis of present perfect (PP) use in Nigerian English (NigE), based on the Nigerian component of theInternational Corpus of English(ICE). First, we analyze variable contexts with the Simple Past (PT; determined by temporally specified contexts) as one of the main competitors of the PP, and thus assess the PP-friendliness of NigE in contrast to other varieties. We further provide an alternative measure of PP-friendliness and test register effects in terms of normalized and relative PP and PT frequencies. Our results indicate an overall reduced PP-friendliness of NigE and show internal variability in terms of PP frequencies in different variable contexts. As regards register effects, NigE does not show less variability of PP frequencies compared to British English (BrE). However, the distribution of the PP across registers in NigE does not follow the British pattern where certain registers are particularly PP-friendly. We discuss potential determining factors of the low frequency of the PP in NigE, and conclude that neither substrate influence nor general learning mechanisms on their own can comprehensively account for it. Instead, we suggest that historical influence from Irish and perhaps (at a later point) American English, in conjunction with general learning mechanisms, may be responsible.

The Present Perfect in Written L2 English

This study examines the distribution of the present perfect (the PP) in written essays of Korean university students. A part of the Yonsei English Learner Corpus (Lee & Chung, 2012) was analyzed focusing on the interaction of L2 proficiency and text types with the use of the PP. The main findings are as follows: 1) The learners’ use of the PP was not as frequent as NS usage, but was comparable to that of NS and NNS university students reported in previous studies. 2) The error patterns revealed that the confusion between the PP and the simple past was a common source of errors both for the high and low levels. Mismatches between temporal adverbials and the PP also led to ungrammatical sentences. 3) The association between the PP and lexical aspects was not evidenced in our data, contrary to the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis. Considering the difficulty of grasping fluid pragmatic meanings of the PP and the time constraint in L2 classroom, a more realistic goal is suggested for the instruction of the PP.

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of English Present Perfect by Chinese EFL Learners

Through the comparison of the corpora of LOCNESS and CLEC, this study examines Chinese EFL learners’ unique features in using English present perfect. It shows that Chinese learners are more obsessed with using resultative perfect compared with native speakers (p<.05). And Chinese learners use more experiential perfect along with their rising English proficiency, and there is a huge gap between different proficient learners (p<.05). With respect to persistent and recent perfect, both native and non-native speakers marginally used them. Chinese learners’ performance may be influenced by many factors such as L1/L2 interference, typicality of target language, learners’ different English proficiency, and learners’ avoidance of using target language, and so on. This study hopes to provide some implications to the EFL teaching.

Learning the Present Perfect in English Through the Drama The Newsroom: A Cognitive + Communicative Approach

Learning the Present Perfect in English Through the Drama The Newsroom: A Cognitive + Communicative Approach

La variación Antepresente / Pretérito en dos áreas del español peninsular

El trabajo se ocupa del modo en que se manifiesta la evolución del pretérito perfecto compuesto (o antepresente) hacia usos propios del pretérito perfecto simple (o pretérito) en dos variedades del español peninsular: el habla de Salamanca y la de San Sebastián. A partir de los modelos que postulan un proceso lineal de gramaticalización del antepresente, que se consolida en la Península en los contextos hodiernales (eventos del mismo día de habla) y se extiende progresivamente hacia los prehodiernales (eventos anteriores al día de habla), presentamos un cuadro de variación más complejo, según el cual San Sebastián cumple con el modelo, pero Salamanca, no. En Salamanca se detectan casos de una “deriva aorística” del antepresente en contextos prehodiernales antes de que se haya consolidado en los hodiernales. Ello nos obliga a plantear una propuesta alternativa al modelo más aceptado de gramaticalización en español peninsular.DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/verba.42.1371

16. Werner, Valentin. 2014. The Present Perfect in World Englishes: Charting Unity and Diversity

16. Werner, Valentin. 2014. The Present Perfect in World Englishes: Charting Unity and Diversity

Developments in the Use of the English Present Perfect

This article examines developments in the use of the present perfect (PP) with the auxiliary have in standard British and American English from 1750 to the present day, drawing data from the drama section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine changes in the type of linguistic contexts that favor the choice of the construction over its main competitor, the simple past tense. A number of significant changes were identified, including a stronger tendency for the have-PP to occur in temporally specified and negative contexts, and to become less favored by transitive verbs and events with direct results (e.g., break, kill, lose, arrive). The findings are interpreted as an indication of a slow functional reconfiguration that contours the construction’s continued grammaticalization. It is suggested that there has been, since the Late Modern English period, a gradual shift in the nature of the construction’s “current relevance,” from the persistence of the present result of a past event to the situational constitution of the “extended-now” interval.

Analysis on Rhetorical Aspects on the Present Perfect : Searching for the Effective Grammar Instruction

Analysis on Rhetorical Aspects on the Present Perfect : Searching for the Effective Grammar Instruction

Focus on speaker subjective involvement in Present Perfect grammaticalization: Evidence from two spanish varieties

&lt;p&gt;As part of a widespread inclination in languages that draws attention to particular chunks of information over others, the variation of Present Perfect (PP) and Preterit (Pret) in Spanish provides speakers with an effective mechanism that projects one particular past event over others in narrative. In oral data from El Salvador and written data from colonial Mexico, the use of PP in narrative clauses is a practical device that speakers exploit to make certain events stand out to the interlocutor. And just as languages use special components -such as intonation, word order, and morphology- to make chunks of information more prominent, these varieties use PP and Pret variation to make temporal and psychological degrees of proximity and remoteness evident to the interlocutor. The breach of PP into narratives seems to be the product of a stylistic recourse with notable cognitive consequences that enhance the speaker's involvement in discourse. Through a grammaticalization process in which PP acquires readings more reminiscent of the Pret's function as a perfective gram, the PP form is reinterpreted as a valid form in those contexts previously reserved for Pret. In short, PP draws attention to greater speaker's affective closeness to the event, while Pret enhances detachment and dissociation.&lt;/p&gt;

Korean Present Perfect and “-ess”

Korean Present Perfect and “-ess”

The Present Perfect and Definite Temporal Adverbials: Reference Grammars and Corpus Evidence

The aim of the present paper is to assess the adequacy of how the grammatical status of the present perfect (PP) is established in three reference grammars of English (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston and Pullum 2002). I propose that the categorizations both as aspect and as tense as presented in these grammars have their inherent weaknesses and are particularly deficient when data from varieties other than British or American English is included. To test this assumption, I will analyze PP occurrences extracted from the International Corpus of English (ICE) appearing in contexts that have traditionally been considered ungrammatical or at least odd. One such context is the co-occurrence of the PP with definite temporal adverbials. In this case, the PP is used like a simple past, which may be taken as evidence for the tense status of the PP and will therefore be the focal point of the analysis.

Future Values of the Qatal and Their Conceptual and Diachronic Logic: How to Chain Future Senses of the Qatal to the Core of Its Semantic Network

The present paper demonstrates that various prospective values displayed by the Biblical Hebrew qatal are logical—both conceptually and diachronically—components of the total meaning offered by the Biblical Hebrew suffix conjugation. By employing a chaining procedure based on typologically plausible tendencies or—under a stronger assumption—universal evolutionary scenarios (i.e., diachronic paths), the author shows that such senses as future perfect, simple future, prospective certainty, or inevitability, future imminence and near future, present about-ness as well as “almost” and counterfactual present perfects are related to and fully compatible with the remaining dominant semantic potential of the qatal (in particular, with its most common values: present perfect, perfective, and past). Namely, the two sets of senses (viz., the perfect-perfective-past domain and the prospective domain) can successfully be mapped and chained by making use of evolutionary rules that typically govern the grammatical life of resultative constructions (such as the Biblical Hebrew qatal ), that is, the anterior path and the future perfect path. Additionally, by means of the latter trajectory, it is possible to demonstrate that the elements of the prospective domain may likewise be ordered and interconnected—they simply correspond to consecutive stages of this typo-logically plausible evolutionary process.

Effect of Explicit Instruction on Comprehension of English Present Perfect by Persian EFL Learners

The English present perfect is one of the most difficult grammatical items for the Persian EFL learners to comprehend. The current study examined whether an explicit grammar explanation would work for this grammatical item among sixty university level learners. Experimental group practiced the target structure with explicit grammar explanation and control group practiced the target structure in the same manner without explicit explanation. The statistical analysis revealed that a significant difference between the pre-test and immediate post-test was found in those who had explicit explanation prior to practice. However, the results of delayed post-test suggested that their comprehension is temporary.

Never Let Them See You Sweat: Silencing and Striving to Appear Perfect among U.S. College Women

Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) impression management, the present study examined how silencing the self (Jack & Dill, 1992) related to psychological distress in US college women. A sample of 149 women aged 18 to 25 enrolled at a large southwestern U.S. university completed a series of survey instruments aimed at gaining knowledge of how several potentially pressure-filled domains of women’s college environment (i.e., Body Image, Romance, Peers, Academics) may factor into a relationship between Silencing and Distress. Path analysis revealed that Silencing was directly, positively related to each source of pressure with the exception of Academic Engagement (where a negative relationship existed). Furthermore, Silencing was directly, positively related to Anxiety and Depression. Additionally, internalization of the thin ideal and competitiveness were predictive of distress among women who Present Perfection, or strive to appear perfect to others. Cluster analyses revealed 4 interpretable clusters of factors related to distress: Middle-of-the-Road, Moderately Appearance Focused, Other-Focused, and Reject Appearance Norms. The Other-Focused women showed the highest levels of distress and lowest academic engagement while those who Reject Appearance Norms showed the lowest distress and highest academic engagement. These relationships indicated that higher levels of attempting to appear perfect to others were related to higher levels of distress among US college women in our sample. This study points to a factor “Presenting Perfection” that may be instrumental in understanding self-silencing behaviors in college women, as well as further understanding the relation between body image, orientation toward others’ judgments, and distress.

Using Processing Instruction for the Acquisition of English Present Perfect of Filipinos

Using Processing Instruction for the Acquisition of English Present Perfect of Filipinos

Social influence in the use of the present perfect in Bilbao

The Present Perfect (PP) in some Peninsular Spanish dialects is following the same path as other Romance languages; it is going through a grammaticalization process where the PP is usurping the semantic domains of the Preterite. This is the case of many Peninsular dialects such as Alicante (Schwenter, 1994) and Madrid (Serrano, 1994) among others as well as Bilbao (Kempas, 2005). He found that the frequencies of PPs in hodiernal contexts were higher than in other Spanish cities so these findings point out to a more advanced path of grammaticalization in this city. Previous studies have paid more attention to the linguistic constraints that favor the use of the PP instead of the Preterite rather than the social factors that influence this linguistic change. In this article, I focus on the study of three social variables (age, gender and class) to account for evidence of a change in progress in Bilbao Spanish.

Variación lingüística en la expresión del pretérito en el español del siglo XIX de España y México: Rasgos deícticos y aspectuales

This article examines and analyzes the linguistic variation of two verbtenses - present perfect (PP) and preterit (PRET) - in the 19th CenturyPeninsular and Mexican Spanish. Scholars have been interestedin the dialectal differences of the time values in the European andAmerican Spanish, from a synchronic angle in the contemporarystages of language. Synchronically it has been pointed out that theprocess of grammaticalization results in the loss of lexical sense ofhave in the construction of complex tenses. However, there has beenno examination of the phase between the formation of PP and thegeneralization on the Peninsular Spanish. Given the need to describethis transformation, we are seeking to establish whether there areparallel differences in the usage frequency of both tenses in Spainand Mexico, and to examine the time function in the Spanish of bothcontinents in this time. Our data comes from two works representingthe 19th Century Spanish of Spain and Mexico, which we analyzedusing GoldVarb. In addition to the dependent variables (PRETand PP), we take into account six linguistic factors as independentvariables. Our analysis shows that there is a significant differencebetween 19th Century Mexican and Peninsular Spanish in the use ofPRET and PP. The preference for the complex form in the European Spanish, distinct to that of the American Spanish, indicates anexisting dialectal variation. Our study reveals that the time systemdistinguishing the Peninsular Spanish in the preterit contour is anolder phenomenon than it was believed to be.

Modelling the “Aoristic Drift of the Present Perfect” as Inflation An Essay in Historical Pragmatics

In this article, the diachronic tendency of present perfect forms to become more and more past tense-like is analysed in terms of an inflationary process within an Iterated Learning Model. The paper proposes to improve on current accounts of the diachrony of present perfects (mostly set in the framework of grammaticalisation theory) by making explicit a selfreinforcing causal mechanism that drives the process, namely that speakers overestimate the current relevance contribution of their utterances. The main theoretical issue is to develop an explicit account of language change where modifications in a linguistic system are long-term effects of the use of language, or, put differently, of speaker-hearer interaction and the biases that act upon them.

Revisiting the ‘present perfect’: Semantic analysis of Andean colonial documents

The present perfect (PP) exhibits great variation in use, while concurrently following the same general evolutionary path across languages. The Spanish PP is no exception, with some varieties being more conservative (e.g. Northwestern Spain, Mexico City), than others (e.g. Alicante, Andes). As little is known of the evolution of the PP in the Andean region – the focus of this paper – a detailed semantic analysis of perfect constructions in the Andean colonial period is presented.Judicial complaints are chosen for the analysis, as they represent controlled event-structured narratives, where the author is the complainant, and the audience is the Spanish administration. As expected, PPs are common in the description of the wrongdoing, since this section narrates events close to the experience of the complainant, that is, events that have affective charge.The analysis suggests that during this period, the PP exhibited semantic functions found in the Spanish of the time, although constrained by discourse strategies attributable to differences in the social status of individuals in colonial society. A unified development of the PP is found to have taken place during this stage of the evolution of the PP in this region, including resultative and current relevance functions.

Tracking the constraints on a grammaticalizing perfect(ive)

AbstractPerfect grammaticalization has been much researched across languages (Bybee, Perkins, &amp; Pagliuca, 1994; Harris, 1982, among others), however, debate continues about the role of continuative and experiential perfects (e.g., Stage II of the proposed path) and how extension to perfective contexts occurs (Schwenter, 1994a, 1994b; Schwenter &amp; Torres Cacoullos, 2008; Squartini &amp; Bertinetto, 1995, 2000). This study examines data from three centuries of Peninsular Spanish dramatic texts in order to track the linguistic factors constraining Present Perfect (PP)-Preterit variation. In the 15th century, the PP was employed in very recent temporal reference contexts, where it had developed a “hot news” function. Use in nonspecified (irrelevant and indeterminate) temporal reference was concentrated in semantic classes associated with resultative use. With time, the PP extended to all semantic classes in irrelevant temporal reference while simultaneously strengthening in perfective, but temporally indeterminate contexts, and finally, hodiernal contexts. Nonspecified temporal reference is believed to play a special role in the PP's grammaticalization: the irrelevant temporal PP function helps to solidify the event focus introduced by the hot news perfect, whereas its use in indeterminate contexts strengthens associations with perfectivity.