One Language, Two Grammars? - part 6 ppt

In most kinds oftext, however, the present perfect will be outnumbered by the preterite inboth varieties, and by a wide margin.What has happened in both English and other languages is th

A detailed analysis of the examples found in the corpus involving thegreatest number of instances (the present-day British newspapers illustrated

in Figure 11.5) reveals that it is useful to distinguish at least twomorphosyntactic categories of the verb lay: a) laying, b) to lay (compared

to the remaining uses Ø lay, lays, laid)

Firstly, the overall entrenchment value of about75 per cent for gerundialcomplements is not reached if the verb lay appears in the shape of an -ingform itself, as in example (8a) In cases like these (cf the column represent-ing all instances of the category laying inFigure11.6), a complement involv-ing another -ing form is obviously felt to be less acceptable than in othermorphosyntactic environments (cf also Ross1972) Instead, an infinitivalcomplement tends to be used to avoid a clash of two -ing forms

(8) a The public hearing has been set to start on Nov 24 and is certain toassume the drama of another show trial of the woman who, while nolonger laying claim to be ‘mother of the nation’, has unabashedambition for high political office (Daily Telegraph1997)

b they found it difficult to lay claim to be British (Guardian 1995)This effect can be accounted for by the horror aequi Principle:

The horror aequi Principle involves the widespread (and presumablyuniversal) tendency to avoid the use of formally (near-) identical and(near-) adjacent (non-coordinate) grammatical elements or structures.(Rohdenburg2003a:236)

all instances excl pre-modified uses of claim

Figure 11.6 The distribution of non-finite complements dependent

on the verb-noun collocation lay claim(s) in various British day newspapers for1990–200421

present-21 p< 0.1%*** for both contrasts between to lay/laying/remaining uses.

Bolinger (1979:44) remarks that ‘The closer the echo, the worse it sounds.Two -ings with a preposition are better than two without.’22 Accordingly,compared to verbs immediately followed by non-finite complements (as instarting doing or to start to do), the horror aequi effect is weakened in the case of

a gerundial construction complementing verb-noun collocations (as in layingclaim to doing), because here the two -ing forms are not directly adjacent withthe noun claim and the preposition to providing a buffer

It is clear that once the gerundial complement is almost fully established,there is virtually no possibility of avoiding it by means of the infinitive anymore In horror aequi contexts such as in laying claim to (playing) an importantrole, we often find that (non-finite) complementation escapes into the domain

of non-sentential structures In cases like these, a non-finite complement form(and therefore a sequence of two -ing forms) can be dispensed with altogetherand replaced by a (non-sentential) NP object (see Vosberg2003a,2006, for theverb avoid)

The second potential horror aequi context is represented by the syntactic category to lay, as in example (8b) In cases where the matrixexpression takes a marked infinitive itself, the horror aequi Principle predictsthat another to-infinitive complementing the collocation would tend to belargely avoided In other words, we would expect the proportion of gerundialcomplements (cf the column representing all instances of the category to lay

morpho-in Figure 11.6) to be much higher than for the remaining uses of lay.However, this does not turn out to be the case Thus, a string of twoinfinitives is obviously not judged to be as unusual and awkward as twosuccessive -ing forms One major reason why structures like (8b) are fullyacceptable is the fact that the old and well-known infinitive is still muchmore entrenched in the English complementation system than the gerund

In addition to the horror aequi Principle, there seems to be yet anotherextra-semantic factor determining the choice of non-finite complementforms The noun claim is occasionally qualified by grammatical or lexicalelements such as determiners or adjectives like the ones in (9a/b)

(9) a His grandfather, a stucco decorator, could lay some claim to be anartist (Daily Telegraph 1995)

b A gold medallist at Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta,Redgrave can already lay justifiable claim to be regarded as Britain’sgreatest Olympian (Daily Telegraph 2000)

It follows fromFigure11.7(see the columns representing all instances) thatthese premodified uses of claim tend to prefer infinitival complements rather

22 It should be noted at this stage that surface (phonetic) identity alone does not seem to be atrigger of horror aequi It is considered objectionable only when it coincides with a maximum of grammatical similarity (see also Hoekstra and Wolf 2004 ) Thus, Bolinger’s ( 1979 : 44) exclusively euphonic motivation mentioned above should be viewed with caution.

than -ing forms According to the Complexity Principle, this does not come

as a surprise, because qualification clearly increases the (cognitive) ity of the expression so that the (presumably) more explicit complementoption – the infinitive – is preferred in these cases

complex-So far, two extra-semantic factors have been shown to exert considerableinfluence on the choice of competing complement types: horror aequi andcognitive complexity One of the most intriguing issues in multifactorialanalyses is the question of how and to what extent different factors influence(weaken or reinforce) one another As for the area under investigation, theredoes not seem to be any interference between the two factors here: exclusion

of the competing factor (see the right columns in Figures 11.6 and 11.7)always shows (more or less) the same contrast as suggested by the figuresrepresenting all examples

5 Can’t stand

A distributional difference between the two national varieties is also quiteevident in the case of infinitival and gerundial complements of the verb standused in the sense of ‘bear’24and preceded by the auxiliaries can or could Allcases considered involve an overt marker of negativity such as the particle not

83/141

658/856 78/127

all instances excl to lay/laying

Figure 11.7 The distribution of non-finite complements dependent

on the verb-noun collocation lay claim(s) in various British day newspapers23

present-23 p< 0.1%*** for both contrasts between premodified and unqualified uses.

24 This excludes cases such as the following:

(i) But pardon me I beseech you, good master Freeman, the day weares, and I haue farre

to go, therefore I cannot stand to tell out the rest: but at our next meeting in troth you shall knowe all; therfore let vs paye our shotte and be walking (EEPF: Edward Sharpham, The Discouerie of the Knights of the Poste, 1597)

(including the corresponding contracted forms) or certain non-assertiveadverbial expressions like no longer or hardly.26

(10) Pon my honour, I can’t stand seeing a whole family going to destruction!(NCF1: Susan Ferrier, Marriage, 1818)

As can be seen fromFigure11.8, the construction was very rare in the textscovering the last two centuries, and the gerundial complement option hasbeen losing ground to the infinitival variant in both BrE and AmE.27The collection of present-day newspapers shows that in AmE the decline

of -ing complements is much further advanced than in the parent variety (seealso the evidence provided by Tottie2002c) Additionally, AmE makes use

of this construction (involving non-finite complements) much more quently than BrE:0.27 instances pmw in the British newspapers for 1990–5and0.7 instances pmw in the transatlantic newspapers for the same period.Again, there is a highly suggestive correlation between the overall frequencyand developmental stages It should be mentioned, though, that the frequency

fre-17/19

6/16

125/193

279/465 18/22

late 20th c 1990–5 1996–2004

BrE AmE

(fiction) (newspapers)

Figure11.8 The development of non-finite complements dependent

on the verb cannot/could not stand in various historical andpresent-day corpora (NCF, EAF, MNC, LNC, ETC, BNC/wridom1; t90–04, g90–04, d91–00, m93–00, i93–94, i02–04; W90–92,L92–99, D92–95, N01)25

25 An American corpus comprising late twentieth-century texts, and thus being equivalent tothe British National Corpus (BNC), is still under construction.

26 Br–Am contrast: p < 0.1%*** for both 1990–5 and 1996–2004; diachronic contrast:

p ¼ 0.13% < 1%** for the fictional British corpora; all others n.s.

27The analysis excludes, however, interrogatives such as

(i) How can you stand to watch this? (Los Angeles Times 1997)

It is found that these uses of stand are predominantly followed by infinitival complements.

of this construction has been decreasing in AmE, while in BrE it has remainednearly constant:0.33 instances pmw in the British newspapers for 1996–2004and0.5 instances pmw in the corresponding American newspapers.

The question as to which of the two auxiliaries is actually used (either can

or could) does not seem to be very influential in the choice of the twonon-finite complement forms (cf.Table11.3,28lines1a/b)

However, the increasing tendency to use the (informal) contractedforms of the construction can/couldþ not involving the verb stand obviouslyhelps to delay the decline of gerundial complements (cf Table 11.3, lines2a/b) These findings are in accordance with the informal character ofthe -ing form as compared to the infinitival option (cf Fanego1996a:75–6for the situation in Early Modern English, and Miller 1993: 130 for non-standard varieties).29

The previous section has shown that some kind of qualification of thepredicate expression (lay some/justifiable claim) can preserve the accept-ability of infinitival complementation a bit longer than usual Similar obser-vations can be made for the variable complementation of the verb (can’t)stand.Table11.3(lines3a/b) shows that any adverbial material modifying thematrix expression and intervening between the modal auxiliary (can or could)and the main verb (stand) tends to increase the use of the infinitival comple-ment of this construction: compare the examples in (11a/b)

(11) a because she has been so traumatised by harassment from Baiulthat she can no longer stand to hear the name Oksana (Guardian1997)

Table11.3 The distribution of non-finite complements dependent on the verb cannot/could not stand (incl contractions and non-affirmative adverbs) in various Britishnewspapers for1996–2004

3a can/could þ seldom/barely/hardly/no longer þ stand cannot/

can’t/could not/ couldn’t þ really/even/longer þ stand 19 4 (17.4%) 233b remaining (straightforward) cases 167 275 (62.2%) 442

28 n.s for lines1a/b, p ¼ 0.01% < 0.1%** for 2a/b, p < 0.1%*** 3a/b.

29 It is, however, doubtful whether the Complexity Principle would be able to account for thepreference of to-infinitives as complements of stand following non-contracted forms of can/ could þnot, because it is far from clear whether the contraction is indicative of a cognitively less demanding structure.

b But I knew it wouldn’t happen because we couldn’t even stand to be inthe same room together (The Times2000)

The intervening material found here serves distinct syntactic and semanticfunctions: non-assertive adverbials (such as no longer or hardly) replace thenegative particle not in order to create a negative context, while other kinds

of adverbs (like even) preserve the negator Ignoring this functional ence, however, we might suggest that the Complexity Principle accounts forthe results shown inTable11.3(lines3a/b) The cognitively more complexenvironments provided by these adverbial modifications tend to acceleratethe replacement of gerunds by to-infinitives as complements of the verb(can’t) stand.30

differ-6 Conclusion

Focusing on a small number of verbs and verb-noun collocations in tional stages of linguistic change mainly within the last two centuries, thepresent study has shown that both BrE and AmE follow the same trends

transi-in the development of non-ftransi-inite complement variants, though at clearlydifferent speeds The process referred to as the ‘Great Complement Shift’(gradual replacement of infinitives by gerunds, cf have no business and layclaim in Table11.4, column I) and sporadic reversals (cf decline and can’tstand inTable11.4, column I) have not affected the two national varieties tothe same extent Compared to BrE, the transatlantic variety leads the devel-opment in some areas (cf have no business, can’t stand, inTable11.4, columnII) and lags behind it in others (cf decline inTable11.4, column II), whileoccasionally (cf lay claim inTable11.4, column II) it represents a case of lagand overtake The contrasts established might be summarized in two differ-ent ways

Table11.4 Summary of the findings

III Variety showing

a higher frequency have no

business

overtake)

BrE

30 The analyses of the American corpora corresponding to the ones presented inTable11.3 do not yield any significant results, yet the tendencies are the same as for the British corpora.

Firstly, the case studies presented here suggest that, with the exception ofthe verb (can’t) stand, AmE is further advanced than BrE in those areas ofnon-finite complementation (compare columns I and II inTable11.4for have

no business and lay claim) where the infinitive is about to be replaced by thegerund (cf., however, Allerton1988:11, 22–3),31and lags behind it where the

gerund is on the decline (compare columns I and II inTable11.4for the verbdecline) It is claimed elsewhere that, unlike BrE, the transatlantic variety isoften found to favour the less formal and less explicit (cf.Chapters4and10,respectively) grammatical option These conclusions are supported by three

of the four major findings discussed in this chapter: have no business, declineand lay claim (but not can’t stand) are among those governing expressionsthat still show (or once showed) a stronger inclination towards the less formal(cf.section5) and less explicit (cf.section3) -ing complement in AmE ratherthan in BrE

Secondly, it has been argued that the variety exhibiting a higher frequency

in the use of a particular governing expression is also the one that is furtheradvanced in the general development (compare columns II and III inTable11.4) This hypothesis does not seem to be confirmed in the case of thecollocation lay claim, which involves the somewhat muddled situation of lagand overtake

In addition to surveying the existing national contrasts, our analysis hasidentified three extra-semantic (and potentially universal) factors likely todelay or accelerate the rise or fall of the two non-finite complement options:a) extractions, b) horror aequi contexts and c) insertions/modifications

31 According to Allerton (1988 : 11, 22–3), both formal/written styles as well as American English

in general are nowadays affected by a frequent and ‘unnatural’ over-use of the infinitive so that the distinction between infinitive and gerund made in informal/conversational British usage

is lost in certain cases.

12 The present perfect and the preterite

J O H A N E L S N E S S

1 Introduction

Like a large number of other languages, English has two competing verbalconstructions commonly used to refer to past time: the periphrastic presentperfect and the synthetic preterite, as in, respectively,

(1) I have seen him recently

and

(2) I saw him recently

The distribution of the two constructions varies a great deal betweenlanguages, and also within individual languages For example, Germanand French can easily have constructions like

(3) Ich habe ihn gestern gesehen

and

(4) Je l’ai vu hier

However, the corresponding construction would not seem acceptable inEnglish:

(5) *I have seen him yesterday

The problem is that, unlike German and French, English puts very severerestrictions on the combination of the present perfect with specifications of aclearly defined temporal location wholly in the past Instead, English gen-erally prefers the preterite in such cases

Moreover, the distinction between the two verb forms is drawn differently

in American as compared with British English While the basic rules are thesame, a sentence like our example (1) above would often be preferred byspeakers of BrE, while many speakers of AmE would be more likely to optfor (2) The point here is that, although the reference is clearly to past time,this time is not very precisely defined, which leaves considerable scope forindividual judgement In such cases there appears to be a distinct tendency

228

for AmE to select the preterite, BrE the present perfect, so that on the wholethe latter verb form is more frequent in BrE than in AmE In most kinds oftext, however, the present perfect will be outnumbered by the preterite inboth varieties, and by a wide margin.

What has happened in both English and other languages is that thepresent perfect has increased in frequency over the centuries, at the expense

of the preterite This is in line with a more general tendency for syntheticforms to be replaced by periphrastic constructions (see, e.g., Zieglschmid

1930a/ ) English seems to differ from many other languages, however, inthat the present perfect may now be in decline

2 The history of the present perfect and the preterite in English

In Old English the preterite was the predominant verb form in references topast time Even in OE, however, some constructions may be recognized asearly instances of the present perfect, with HAVE (HABBAN) followed by apast participle To begin with, this construction occurred only with tran-sitive verbs, but it gradually spread to other patterns Besides, there was asimilar construction with BE (WESAN), common with (intransitive) muta-tive verbs

In the early stages it is not always easy to draw the line between perfectconstructions and constructions where HAVE is the main verb and the pastparticiple has a clear adjectival function In a major investigation of thepresent perfect in English (reported in Elsness 1997) my policy was torecognize as perfects all such HAVE constructions provided the referencewas clearly to past time associated with the past-participial verb, irrespective

of whether the participle was inflected for concord with the putative object,and also irrespective of whether the participle was pre- or postposed relative

to this object.1For that investigation I collected a corpus consisting of textsdating all the way from Old English up to Present-Day English, in mostcases concentrated in50-year periods spread over 200-year intervals In thecase of the period1750–1800 and the present day, both American and BritishEnglish were represented.2

Two of the constructions recognized as occurrences of the present perfect

in the Old English section of my corpus are:

(6) and we habbað Godes hus inne and ute clæne berypte

(From ‘Wulfstan’s Address to the English’)

‘and we have completely despoiled God’s houses inside and out’

1 This pragmatic view of what constitutes a perfect construction is in line with that adopted inDenison ( 1993 : 340–1).

2 For details of the composition of this corpus, see Elsness (1997 ).

(7) For ðæm we habbað nu ægðer forlæten ge ðone welan ge ðone wisdom.(From ‘On the State of Learning in England’)

‘Therefore we have now lost both the wealth and the wisdom.’

What happens in Old and Middle English is that the various perfect formsgradually become more frequent, at the expense of the preterite, taking overmore and more of the semantic functions of that verb form

The growth and spread of the present perfect does not continue in thesame way in the Modern English period, however.3In the AmE section of

my corpus there is a marked drop in the proportion of present-perfect formsfrom 1750–1800 to the present day In the BrE material the developmentwithin the Modern English period is more uncertain: the increase in thefrequency of the present perfect levels off from1550–1600 to 1750–1800 butmay then seem to get a second wind in the last200-year span The figures forthe present perfect (with auxiliary HAVE) and the preterite are set out in

Table12.1 Both active and passive forms are included in these figures but noprogressives.4The development of the present perfect is further illustrated

day AmE

Present-n ¼ 989 n ¼ 916 n ¼ 906 n ¼ 859 n ¼ 880 n ¼ 854 n ¼ 1883 n ¼ 1588 Present

combi-at the beginning of the Middle English period For a comparison of American and British English the BE perfect is in any case less relevant, as the predominance of the HAVE alternative was well nigh complete from the beginning of the Modern English period For full details, see Elsness ( 1997 : 267–9, 271–2, 322–7).

can be difficult enough even without the kind of diachronic gaps we are facedwith here (for the comparison of different varieties of Present-Day English,for instance); comparing corpora spread over several centuries means thatthere will be unavoidable differences in the makeup of text categories, forexample Even so, if clear differences emerge, they may provide usefulinsight into the way a language has developed.

In the composition of my own corpus the number of texts included ineach section was in most cases sufficient to neutralize, or at least greatlyreduce, the impact of any very idiosyncratic texts A possible exception is thecategory of science texts from Present-Day English, where a much smallernumber of texts than usual were included from each variety A very strikingdifference in the present perfect/preterite distribution was recordedbetween these texts: the present perfect was a lot more frequent than thepreterite in the BrE texts but almost absent from the AmE ones In thisparticular text category that difference went far beyond any general AmE/BrE difference in the use of this verb form

Figure12.2illustrates the development of the present perfect when thescience category is disregarded in Present-Day English It can now be seenthat this verb form displays a marked decline in BrE as well as AmE from1750–1800 up to the present day – in the present-day section the proportion

of present-perfect forms drops from19.7 per cent (cf.Table12.1) to12.2 percent (n¼ 1581) in BrE, while it rises slightly, from 9.8 per cent (cf.Table12.1)

to10.5 per cent (n¼1297), in AmE

This indeed shows the linguist at the mercy of his corpus In an attempt tofind more reliable evidence for the development of the present perfect over

the past two centuries we shall look at some text categories separately In mycorpus the following text categories can be identified both in the present-day section and at least in the section from1750–1800, and with one excep-tion even further back: (i) news columns of newspapers, (ii) social letters,(iii) narrative passages of fiction, (iv) direct speech of fiction and (v) drama.5

Table 12.2 sets out the proportions of present-perfect and preterite verbforms, again expressed as percentages of all past-referring verb forms Thebottom two lines of each section give the chi-square value and the statisticalsignificance, or otherwise, of the change from the preceding period.6

We shall focus on developments within BrE, since the decline of thepresent perfect in AmE does not seem to be in doubt.Figure12.3illustratesthe results for BrE

It will be seen that in four of the five text categories there is a decrease inthe frequency of the present perfect in that variety from 1750–1800 to the

5 This is not to deny that the comparison of text categories across centuries is problematic, andthat the use of language, even within similar texts, may change quite drastically over time Even so, looking at developments within what is here recognized as similar text categories separately reduces some of the problems of diachronic corpus comparison.

6 The statistical evidence was calculated by applying the chi-square test to the underlying rawfigures for the present perfect and the preterite in each section compared with the preceding section in the same variety (AmE/BrE) (degrees of freedom ¼1 throughout) In the case of AmE from 1750–1800 the comparison is with the overall (BrE) figures from 1550–1600.

distant in time, while today even news reported in print tends to be located

in the much more recent past That this should make for a difference inthe distribution between the present perfect and the preterite verb forms

in the observed direction was only to be expected, since throughout theperiod covered here the present perfect has been particularly frequent

in references to the recent past, the preterite generally being preferred torefer to clearly defined points and periods in what will often be a moredistant past time

We have seen that the steady increase in the frequency of the presentperfect which was observable in Old and Middle English – a developmentwhich English shared with a number of other languages – has been arrestedwithin the Modern English period There is also strong evidence to supportthe assumption that over the past couple of centuries the growth of theEnglish present perfect has not only been arrested but reversed, i.e that thefrequency of the present perfect has started to decrease The evidence forthis latter conclusion must be said to be conclusive for AmE and is nowalso pretty convincing for BrE At the same time it seems clear that inPresent-Day English the present perfect is still more frequent in BrE than

it is in AmE

If the present perfect may now be in decline, it makes sense to look forcases in earlier English where this verb form was used but where it would beunlikely to occur in Present-Day English However, since the functionaldistinction between the present perfect and the preterite is far from beingclear-cut in all cases, it seems likely that at least some of the change can beaccounted for by cases where either verb form can still be used but where thepresent perfect would be more likely to be preferred in earlier ModernEnglish than it would today

Visser (1973:2197) records several examples of the present perfect bining with past-time specification in earlier Modern English, in a way thatwould seem unlikely to occur in the present-day language:

com-(8) I have delivered it an hour since (Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well,1601)

(9) which I have forgot to set down in my Journal yesterday (Pepys’Diary,1669)

(10) The Englishman has murdered young Halbert yesterday ing (Scott, Monastery,1820)

morn-(11) I have been to Richmond last Sunday (Galsworthy, In Chancery, 1920)The following examples were recorded in the BrE section of my own corpusfrom1750–1800:

(12) Nor is this topic confined merely to modern religions The ancients havealso employed it (Hume, The Natural History of Religion)

(13) Lady Sneer I have found him out a long time since I know him to beartful, selfish, and malicious – in short, a sentimental knave (Sheridan,The School for Scandal)

(14) Lady Sneer but do your brother’s distresses increase?

Joseph S Every hour I am told he has had another execution in thehouse yesterday In short, his dissipation and extravagance exceed any-thing I have ever heard of (Sheridan, The School for Scandal)

And the following well-known passage occurs in my own corpus from1550–1600, with the choice between the present perfect and the preteriteapparently determined more by metrical than by temporal considerations:(15) Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft

Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,

To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,

Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

The live-long day, with patient expectation,

To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome

And when you saw his chariot but appear,

Have you not made an universal shout,

That Tiber trembled underneath her banks

To hear the replication of your sounds

Made in her concave shores? (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

The above collection of examples demonstrates that in earlier (British)Modern English the present perfect was used more freely in combinationwith specifications of past time than what is common in the English language

of today This further corroborates the conclusion that the present perfect isnow decreasing in frequency in BrE as well as AmE

3 Elicitation test

As regards today’s relationship between AmE and BrE, we have seen that mycorpus showed the present perfect to be more frequent in the latter variety.This is in line with several earlier claims to the same effect.7 Furtherevidence is provided by an elicitation test I carried out with American andBritish students acting as informants.8In that test participants were asked to

7 For an early demonstration of this difference between present-day AmE and BrE, seeVanneck ( 1958 ).

8 The elicitation test was carried out at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA,and at Cambridge University, England, in 1986 and 1987, respectively The number of participants in the test was eighty for AmE and ninety-three for BrE They were each given a questionnaire with a total of thirty-four pairs of constructions In the actual test the order of the various sentence pairs was varied, as was the order of the perfect/preterite alternatives within each pair For further details, see Elsness ( 1990 and 1997 ).

indicate their view of each sentence they were presented with on a scale from

1 (totally unacceptable) to 5 (perfectly OK)

Some of the constructions used in the test are reproduced below, withaverage scores given separately for AmE and BrE The AmE/BrE differ-ences were tested for statistical significance by means of Student-Fisher’st-test In each case the significance level is indicated in the right-hand column

The first construction pair reproduced here demonstrates that in cases ofclearly defined past-time reference the preterite, and not the present perfect,

is the verb form used in English

IIa That problem has been solved long ago 2.3 3.1 0.1%

b That problem was solved long ago 4.8 4.9 n.s.IIIa Yes, John is here I have just seen him 3.4 4.8 0.1%

b Yes, John is here I just saw him 4.7 3.4 0.1%

II and III show that once the past time referred to is more vaguely defined,the picture becomes more varied The preference for the preterite is nolonger so clear – indeed, in the case of construction pair III BrE recorded thehigher score for the present-perfect alternative – and the difference betweenAmE and BrE is also marked, three of the four sentences displaying anAmE/BrE difference that is statistically significant at the0.1 % level.9

IVa I’m going to lunch now Have you had yours? 4.0 4.7 0.1%

b I’m going to lunch now Did you have yours? 3.6 2.3 0.1%This pair of constructions may be seen as a test of the influence of the currentrelevance of the past situation on the choice of verb form In any case thepreference for the present perfect is much more marked in BrE than in AmE

Va Have you finished the book already? 4.6 4.9 0.1%

b Did you finish the book already? 4.1 1.5 0.1%VIa Have you told them the news yet? 4.8 4.9 1%

9 In these as in other cases factors other than the mere temporal reference may have influencedthe scores, for instance whether the main verb is regular or irregular – the formal difference between the two verb forms being more marked in the latter case – and also the fact that only uncontracted forms of the auxiliary were used in the test, a fact which may have lowered the scores for the present-perfect alternatives, perhaps especially in AmE For further discus- sion, see Elsness ( 1990 and 1997 ).

V and VI confirm that constructions with the rather special adverbs alreadyand yet are judged very differently by speakers of AmE and BrE Here thepresent perfect is definitely the norm in BrE, while AmE is almost as ready

to accept the preterite

AmE BrE pVIIa Do you know who has written this book? 2.5 3.1 1%

b Do you know who wrote this book? 4.9 4.8 n.s.VIIIa This cake is delicious Have you made it yourself? 1.6 2.6 0.1%

b This cake is delicious Did you make it yourself? 4.9 4.9 n.s.IXa That’s a nice picture Who has painted it? 1.9 2.4 1%

b That’s a nice picture Who painted it? 5.0 5.0 n.s.The last three construction pairs reproduced from the elicitation test focus

on what may be termed unique past-time reference In each case contextmakes it clear that the action denoted by the main verb must have occurredonce – but only once – in the past: since the book/cake/picture exists at themoment of utterance, it must have been written/made/painted at some time

in the past, and these past actions will only have been performed once (in thisrespect painting a picture is different from painting a house, for example)

It will be seen that in these cases English shows a very clear preferencefor the preterite, whereas many other languages would use the presentperfect, so that this is a verbal usage that needs to be noted by many foreignlearners of English The preference for the preterite in these cases can beseen to be even stronger in AmE than in BrE, in the sense that the present-perfect alternatives achieved somewhat higher scores in BrE, although even

in that variety the preference for the preterite is clear enough

Quite a few of the constructions we have considered display a statisticallysignificant difference between AmE and BrE, and invariably it is AmE that hasthe higher score for the preterite alternative, BrE for the present perfect.10

Table12.3sums up the results for all the constructions included in the test forwhich a statistically significant AmE/BrE difference was recorded, i.e for atotal of thirty-one of the sixty-eight constructions which made up the test

Table12.3 Distribution of all present perfect/preterite constructions fromelicitation test with a statistically significant difference between Americanand British English

Higher score: American English British English Sums

The fact that most of the constructions displaying a statistically significantdifference in acceptability were ones preferred in BrE can perhaps be seen asevidence that in the present situation typically American forms are moreuniversally acceptable, at least across the Atlantic, than typically Britishforms.

4 A closer look at developments within the second half

of the twentieth century

At the time when the investigation reported in Elsness (1997) was carriedout, I did not have access to the Freiburg updates of Brown and LOB made

up of texts from the early1990s, commonly referred to as Frown and FLOB,respectively The existence of these new corpora, closely parallel to Brownand LOB in their textual composition, offers a unique opportunity to studythe development of both AmE and BrE within the second half of thetwentieth century, or, to be more precise, from1961 to 1991/1992

For the investigation to be reported below I had to base myself on theuntagged versions of Frown and FLOB I shall concentrate on the presentperfect and address the question of whether any further development can bedetected in the use of that verb form, in AmE and/or BrE, within thethirty-year period spanned by Brown/LOB and Frown/FLOB

One very rough indication of the frequency of the present perfect can beassumed to be the frequency of present tense forms of the verb HAVE Thisverb has a number of different syntactic functions, both as a main verb and as

an auxiliary, but it seems that in most kinds of text the function of perfectauxiliary will account for between one-half and two-thirds of its occurrencesand be by far its most common single function (see Elsness1997: 84 and

2000/2001:16, 36) The task of identifying present-perfect forms is pounded by the fact that the particular form have doubles as the infinitiveform of HAVE.11Also, it is obviously important to include contracted forms,since these can be expected to make up a substantial proportion of overalloccurrences, especially since the use of contractions in print can be assumed

com-to have increased from1961 to 1991/1992, so that they will be important inany attempt to account for developments during this period.12

Table12.4lists the frequencies recorded of the various potential tense realizations of HAVE, irrespective of syntactic function The firstsummation column adds up the figures from all the preceding columns.Here there can be seen to be a marked increase in both AmE and BrE from

present-1961 to 1991/1992, of more than 10 per cent in both cases but more in AmE

11 I am confining myself to indicative verb forms here In addition, of course, have occursacross the present tense paradigm in the subjunctive A more frequent use can be assumed to

be that of the imperative.

12 This is especially relevant since the four parallel corpora comprise only printed, publishedtexts.

the uncontracted negative form has not are included among the figures forhas In any case the figures for has predominate even more here, and there is amarked decrease in the number of occurrences during this period, of5.4 percent in AmE and3.3 per cent in BrE.14

Although the evidence considered so far is by no means conclusive as regardsthe development of the present perfect, the figures set out inTable 12.4dosuggest that there was a decrease in the frequency of present tense forms ofHAVE from1961 to 1991/1992 As there seems to be no particular reason tobelieve that there was any significant change in the frequency of HAVE used

in other functions than that of the perfect auxiliary, this may be taken astentative support for the assumption that the decrease in the frequency of thepresent perfect that was recorded earlier in the Modern English periodcontinued in the latter half of the twentieth century and was even noticeablewithin such a short time span as the30 years from 1961 to 1991/1992

We need to look for further, and firmer, evidence Table12.5gives theresults of an examination of the present perfect of twenty high-frequencyverbs in the four parallel corpora.15To simplify the electronic search, onlyconstructions where these verbs take personal pronouns as subjects wereincluded Both contracted and full auxiliaries were included in the search Amaximum of two optional words were allowed between the auxiliary and themain verb Since the total number of personal pronouns varies somewhatamong the four corpora, occurrences of the present perfect per 1,000personal pronouns were calculated, the results appearing in the right-handcolumn ofTable12.5 These results are illustrated inFigure12.4

It will be seen that when we look directly at occurrences of the presentperfect in the four parallel corpora, the impression of a continuing decline inthe use of this verb form from1961 to 1991/1992 is confirmed.16The decline

14 The change is not statistically significant in either AmE or BrE so long as each variety isconsidered separately: w 2 ¼3.7064 and w 2 ¼1.5633, respectively However, if the figures for the two varieties are put together, the difference in the number of has/hasn’t forms between

1961 and 1991/1992 is statistically significant at the 5 per cent level: w 2 ¼ 5.0002.

15 The twenty verbs were selected from frequency lists of the four corpora BE, HAVE and

DO were avoided, because of the auxiliary functions that these verbs may have GET was also excluded, because of the complications following from the idiomatic use of have got, more common in BrE than in AmE.

16 Evidence has been presented which suggests that a development in the opposite directionmay be under way in certain types of colloquial English Engel and Ritz ( 2000 ) report that in their corpus of Australian English, largely made up of radio news and chat shows, the present perfect is used quite extensively in references to clearly defined past time, either specified by temporal adverbials or being part of narrative passages The following example illustrates the former: ‘Police confirm that at 16.30 hours yesterday the body of Ivan Jepp has been located’ (Engel and Ritz 2000 : 130) A brief reference to the present perfect in the editor’s introduction to Trudgill ( 1978 : 13) suggests that this phenomenon may not be confined to Australian English Trudgill claims that constructions like ‘He’s played for us last year,’ are used by ‘increasing numbers of speakers’ Focusing on spoken and non-standard varieties of BrE, Miller ( 2004a / b ) likewise reports cases where the present perfect is used in combination with a clear adverbial specification of past time, e.g ‘Some of us have been to

is more marked in BrE than in AmE Indeed, the figures for AmE are notstatistically significant and thus may be due to chance The figures for BrE,

on the other hand, show a very reassuring statistical significance at the0.1per cent level.17

At the same time the present perfect continues to be more frequent inBrE than in AmE even in Present-Day English, although the gap betweenthe two varieties appears to be closing: even the figures from the early1990s

Table12.5 The present perfect of twenty high-frequency lexical verbs with personalpronoun subjects ( I, you, he, she, it, we, they) in the four parallel corpora: SAY,MAKE, GO, TAKE, SEE, KNOW, COME, GIVE, USE, THINK, LOOK, FIND,BECOME, WANT, TELL, LEAVE, SHOW, FEEL, WORK, ASK

Pres perf of 20 verbs Personal pronouns Pres perf per 1,000 p pron.

New York years ago to see how they do it’ (Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat MP, in BBC News at Ten interview, January 2002) (Miller 2004a : 234, 2004b : 323) Since the four parallel corpora that our figures are based on only contain printed, published texts, they would be less likely to capture constructions which may occur mainly in more colloquial registers and non-standard dialects.

17 Statistical significance of change: Brown/Frown: n.s (w 2 ¼ 0.5864); LOB/FLOB: p  0.001 (w 2 ¼ 12.8601).

show a difference between AmE and BrE, statistically significant at the5per cent level.18One interpretation of the figures recorded here comparedwith the findings presented previously is that the decline in the use of thepresent perfect is now slowing down in AmE and that BrE is approaching thelevel of AmE.19

5 Concluding remarks

The continuing decline of the present perfect means that the development inEnglish runs counter to that observable in many other languages, includingFrench and German, where the spread of the present perfect, at the expense

of the preterite, seems to be continuing unabated As was suggested inElsness (1997), the main reason for this may be that the formal differencebetween the present perfect and the preterite in English has been reduced tosuch an extent that the distinction is difficult to uphold, seeing that thefunctional-semantic difference between them is also small: in speech theauxiliary of the present perfect is often reduced to just an /s/ or a /z/ or abarely audible /v/, and the contracted forms of the auxiliary are increasinglycommon even in the written language; and the expression of the past-participial main verb is identical with that of the competing preterite inthe case of all regular and quite a few irregular verbs, in both speech andwriting.20Even with most of the verbs which retain distinct preterite andpast-participial forms, the formal difference between the two forms is slightcompared with that obtaining in German, French and many other languages

In the decline of the English present perfect it is AmE that seems to havebeen leading the way This is in line with a more general tendency for

18 Statistical significance of AmE/BrE differences: Brown/LOB: p 0.001 (w 2 ¼ 25.8483); Frown/FLOB: p  0.05 (w 2 ¼ 5.5546).

19 Comparison of a preliminary version of the tagged Frown and FLOB corpora with thetagged Brown and LOB suggests that verbs may generally be slightly less frequent in the corpora from 1991/1992 than in those from 1961, nouns slightly more frequent At least in the case of verbs, this seems to be due mainly, perhaps wholly, to the fictional text categories

of the four corpora, where the proportion of direct speech is important for this as for many other distributions The exact significance of this difference between the corpora from 1961 and those from 1991/1992 is difficult to assess at the present moment, although it is clear that any variation in clause/sentence length and in the proportion of sentence fragments, as well

as that of direct speech, will easily influence the frequencies of verbs and nouns The recorded differences seem so slight that the possibility cannot be ruled out that they are due

to subtle differences in the composition of the four corpora rather than to a general change

in the English language as used in 1961 versus 1991/1992 In any case these more general differences seem small by comparison with the differences reported above in the frequency

of the present perfect I am grateful to Christian Mair and Lars Hinrichs for making the preliminary version of the tagged Frown and FLOB available to me.

20 See further Defromont (1973 ) It may be noteworthy that of the twenty verbs subjected to special examination above (see Table 12.5 ), chosen because of their high frequencies of occurrence, as many as twelve have identical preterite/past-participial forms This count does not include SHOW, which displays variation between shown and showed in the past participle.

linguistic change to have advanced further in AmE than in BrE, at least as far

as the verb phrase is concerned: the continuing expansion of the progressive

is one example; the use of identical forms for both the preterite and the pastparticiple is another.21

This latter point is of particular relevance in our context Even withinwhat can safely be termed Standard English there is an often notedtendency for regular verb forms to be more frequent in AmE, irregularones in BrE, in cases where both are available (BURN, DREAM, LEAP,SMELL, SPELL, SPOIL are some of these).22 Generally, however, thesame form is used for both the preterite and the past participle In additionthere is a tendency, most notable in colloquial usage, for once irregularverbs to become regularized, and this tendency seems to be stronger inAmE (and at least in some cases, also in Australian English) than in BrE.Collins and Peters (2004: 595–7) mention verbs such as MOW, SOW,STRIDE, STRIVE and THRIVE They further note a group of verbswhich remain irregular but where the number of forms seems to be in theprocess of being reduced from three to two, i.e the same form is increas-ingly used for both the preterite and the past participle These are verbswith an -i- stem which used to have -a- in the preterite and -u- in the pastparticiple: SHRINK, SING, SINK, SPRING, STINK With these thereseems to be a tendency which is much stronger in colloquial AmE (andAustralian English) than in BrE to use the -u- form even for the preterite:

‘My old woolly jumper shrunk in the wash,’ ‘Their dog sunk his teeth intothe visitor’s leg.’23

In short, the tendency towards using the same form for both the preteriteand the past participle seems to have advanced further in AmE than in BrE.There also appears to be an AmE/BrE difference in the first element of theperfect form: the use of contracted forms in print appears to have spreadfaster in that variety than in BrE.24Between them these two developmentsmean that the reduction of the formal difference between the present perfect

21 For support for the claim that the progressive is more frequent in AmE, see for instanceBiber et al ( 1999 : 462–3) Biber et al record the greatest AmE/BrE difference in the use of the progressive in the conversational section of their corpus, which may be why the AmE/ BrE difference is not so striking in the newspaper texts examined by Mair and Hundt ( 1995 ) The greater frequency of the progressive in AmE is confirmed by Elsness ( 1997 : 268), where 2.5 per cent of all past-referring verb forms are made up of the preterite progressive in the section of contemporary written AmE, as against only 1.8 per cent in the corresponding BrE section.

22 See Biber et al (1999 : 397), Hundt ( 1997 : 136) and Johansson ( 1979 : 205–6).

23 Collins and Peters (2004 ) record a clear tendency for this usage to be more common among the younger generation in their Australian material Biber et al ( 1999 : 398) note a tendency

to ‘confuse’ (both ways) the distinction between swam and swum but do not link this to any difference between AmE and BrE (or any other geographical variety).

24 See for instance Hundt (1997 : 141–2), where the use of contracted forms in written AmE and BrE is investigated See also Peters ( 2001 : 168–75).

and the preterite has proceeded faster in AmE, which helps to explain whythe decline of the present perfect has also been faster in that variety.25The state of the present perfect in Irish English is also of interest Possiblyinfluenced by the fact that Irish itself lacks any clearly defined perfectconstruction, Irish English tends to use constructions which deviate fromStandard English in expressing some of the temporal meanings which in thelatter variety would be associated with the present perfect (see, e.g., Harris

1991:201–5 and Siemund2004) This may have contributed further to theweakening of the position of the present perfect, especially in AmE.The conclusion drawn by Biber (1987) may further help to shed light on thedevelopment of the present perfect in AmE vs BrE in Late Modern English

On the basis of an extensive investigation into the behaviour of a large number

of grammatical features in American and British texts, Biber concludes that: writing prescriptions appear to play a greater role in the Britishgenres than in the corresponding American genres

the differences seem to relate to a single underlying functionalpriority: the greater influence of grammatical and stylistic prescriptions inBritish writing Whether these differences reflect different writing stylesacross the dialects [i.e AmE vs BrE], or different editorial practices, orboth, they characterize systematic differences between British andAmerican written texts (Biber1987:116–17)

This difference may have helped to preserve the position of the presentperfect better in BrE than in AmE It seems to be a pretty common attitude,not least in the teaching profession, that in some cases the present perfect ismore ‘correct’ than the preterite, for instance in combinations with a tem-poral adverbial like just Such attitudes may have been more widespread, andmore influential, in Britain than in the United States

Finally, the development of the present perfect that has been confirmed forlate Modern English is part of a much larger picture as far as the relationshipbetween AmE and BrE is concerned There can be little doubt that today themain linguistic pressure between these two major varieties of English is in thedirection from AmE to BrE, as amply confirmed for instance by Johansson(1979) The fairly rapid decline in the use of the present perfect which appears tohave occurred in AmE may thus have contributed to speeding up the sameprocess in BrE

25 It is noteworthy that several of the American informants taking part in the elicitation testreported orally that in some cases they would have preferred a form ‘between’ the present perfect and the preterite This may be seen as a highly significant indication that at least AmE has already reached a stage where the present perfect and the preterite are not always perceived as clearly distinct verb forms (In the test all constructions were given without contracted forms, so as not to prejudge the distinction between full and reduced forms This may have made some of the perfect alternatives less attractive than they would have been with the contracted auxiliary, perhaps especially to the American informants.)

13 The revived subjunctive

G O ¨ R A N K J E L L M E R

1 Introduction

The reintroduction of subjunctive forms in Modern English is a fascinatingstory of the reshaping of an important section of the language Verb formslike be shared in

(1) It was decided that this proposal be shared

were extremely rare up to less than a century ago, not to mention negatedforms like not use in

(2) Most dermatologists suggested that you not use these soaps,

but today they are frequently met with in AmE and beginning to appear inBrE Not surprisingly, the recent restructuring of the verb system hasattracted the attention of linguists and resulted in a number of articles and

at least one full-length study, Gerd O¨ vergaard’s The Mandative Subjunctive

in American and British English in the20th Century (1995) In the following,certain aspects of the process will be discussed After a general background,dealing with the definition of terms and the history of the subjunctive inEnglish, the discussion will fall into three parts: why the subjunctive returned

in AmE, why it returned in BrE and why not occurs before the verb in negatedsubjunctive constructions

To illustrate my points I shall be making frequent use of theword CobuildDirect Corpus, a corpus containing British (chiefly), Americanand Australian contemporary material from a variety of mainly writtensources (For a description of the corpus, see Sinclair (1987) and, forexample, the Website http://www.titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk)

57-million-2 Background

2.1 Definition

The term subjunctive, as used about the modern phenomenon, refers to thebase form of the verb (except were), which lacks tense and agreement featuresand does not take DO support The mandative subjunctive can occur in

246