The Present Perfect in World Englishes

This study offers an account of the Present Perfect and its usage in worldwide varieties of English. It is based on corpus data from the International Corpus of English (ICE), which is assessed both quantitatively and qualitatively. It follows up on two broad desiderata in Present Perfect research, namely (i) to extend the knowledge of this grammatical area beyond the traditional British/American English paradigm, and (ii) to provide a systematic account of language-external effects such as modes of discourse, macro-genres and text categories. Occurrences of the Present Perfect are automatically extracted from part-of-speech tagged corpus files. Representative samples of the occurrences are then manually annotated for various factors (such as semantics, Aktionsart, temporal adverbials, sentence type, preceding tense, etc.) so that the distributions and the relative importance of these factors can be analyzed. In addition, the impact of alternative (non-standard) surface forms that may express a Present Perfect notion is considered. Measures of similarity between the various varieties of English under investigation are established (e.g. with the help of multidimensional aggregational methods such as cluster analyses and phylogenetic networks) and findings are related to a number of general models of World Englishes, whose descriptive adequacy for this particular area of grammar is tested.