Cover not available

Article In: English World-Wide: Online-First Articles

The present perfect and definite past time adverbials

A corpus-based study of British and American English

ORCiD logo with link | Independent Researcher
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This study examines non-canonical uses of the Present Perfect (PrPf) with definite past time adverbials such as yesterday, last + NP, and ago in British English (BrE) and American English (AmE), drawing on data from the British National Corpus (from Oxford University Press). Davies, Mark, ed. 2004. Available online at 〈[URL]〉. and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Davies, Mark, ed. 2008–. Available online at 〈[URL]〉.. While quantitatively marginal, these uses reveal a distinctive pattern: in pragmatically marked contexts, especially in spontaneous speech and media, the PrPf encodes both past anchoring and current relevance, violating canonical constraints. I argue that these instances reflect a strategy of relevance compression, where the PrPf functions as a discourse shortcut, simultaneously maintaining topic continuity and signaling temporal relevance. Ambiguous contexts, where current relevance and past perfective readings co-exist, are prevalent in AmE, where a past perfective interpretation may be salient. Ultimately, the study confirms that genre and register shape the distribution and interpretation of tense forms, with innovation concentrated in spoken, spontaneous contexts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Present perfect with past adverbials: Previous research
  • 3.Corpora and methodological framework
  • 4.Theoretical framework
  • 5.Quantitative analysis
    • 5.1Data from BNC
    • 5.2Data from COCA
    • 5.3Comparison of quantitative data
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Present perfect with Yesterday
    • 6.2Present perfect with Last + NP
    • 6.3Present perfect with Ago
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Sources
  • References
References (45)
Sources
British National Corpus (from Oxford University Press). Davies, Mark, ed. 2004. Available online at 〈[URL]〉.
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Davies, Mark, ed. 2008–. Available online at 〈[URL]〉.
References
Bittner, Maria. 2014. Temporality: Universals and Variation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bondar, Vladimir. 2023. “The Present Perfect in Past Time Contexts: A Diachronic Study of English”. Brno Studies in English 491: 5–29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere, and Pagliuca, William. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cox, Rebecca. 2005. “Preterite Uses of the Present Perfect in New Zealand English Narratives: A Case Study”. M.A. Thesis, University of Canterbury.
Dahl, Östen. 2022. “Perfects Across Languages.” Annual Review of Linguistics 81: 279–297. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davydova, Julia. 2011. The Present Perfect in Non-Native Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study of Variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elsness, Johan. 1997. The Perfect and the Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “The Perfect and the Preterite in Australian and New Zealand English.” In Pam Peters, Peter Collins, and Adam Smith, eds. Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 89–114. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fryd, Marc. 2020. “Puzzling out the English Present Perfect Puzzle”. Études anglaises 731: 452471. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grosz, Barbara J., Joshi, Aravind K., and Weinstein, Scott. 1995. “Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse”. Computational Linguistics 211: 203–225.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haselow, Alexander. 2017. Spontaneous Spoken English: An Integrated Approach to the Emergent Grammar of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne and Smith, Nicholas. 2009. “The Present Perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?” ICAME Journal 331: 4564.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klein, Wolfgang. 1992. “The Present Perfect Puzzle”. Language 681: 525–552. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, Lunkenheimer, Kerstin, and Ehret, Katharina, eds. 2020. The “Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English”. Zenodo. 〈[URL]〉 (Accessed December 12, 2025)
Leech, Geoffrey. 2004. Meaning and the English Verb. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lindstedt, Jouko. 2000. “The Perfect — Aspectual, Temporal and Evidential”. In Östen Dahl, ed. Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 365–383. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, Jim. 2000. “The Perfect in Spoken and Written English”. Transactions of the Philological Society 981: 323–352. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. “Perfect and Resultative Constructions in Spoken and Non-Standard English”. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde and Harry Perridon, eds. Up and Down the Cline: The Nature of Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 229–246. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milroy, James. 1984. “The History of English in the British Isles”. In Peter Trudgill, ed. Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5–31.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Portner, Paul. 2003. “The (Temporal) Semantics and (Modal) Pragmatics of the Perfect”. Linguistics and Philosophy 261: 459–510. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rastall, Paul. 1999. “Observations on the Present Perfect in English”. World Englishes 181: 79–84. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richards, Sophie. 2018. Tense/Aspect Variation and the Present Perfect in Australian English Narratives: Sociolinguistic Constraints and Discourse-Pragmatic Functions. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Western Australia.
Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2010. “The Perfect Crime: A Study of Illicit Adverbials Combinations with the Present Perfect in Australian Police Media Releases”. Journal of Pragmatics 421: 3400–3417. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. “‘Hot News’ and Perfect Change: Mirativity and the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface”. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 171: 135–155. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ritz, Marie–Eve, and Engel, Dulcie M. 2008. “‘Vivid Narrative Use’ and the Meaning of the Present Perfect in Spoken Australian English”. Linguistics 461: 131–160. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schaden, Gerhard. 2009. “Present Perfects Compete”. Linguistics and Philosophy 321: 115–141. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. 1994. “’Hot News’ and the Grammaticalization of Perfects”. Linguistics 321: 995–1028. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Skala, Julia. 2018. “The Present Perfect Puzzle in US-American English: an FDG Analysis”. Open Linguistics 41: 608–629. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1984. “Standard English in England”. In Peter Trudgill, ed. Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 32–44.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van der Klis, Martijn, Le Bruyn, Bert, and de Swart, Henriëtte. 2022. “A multilingual corpus study of the competition between past and perfect in narrative discourse”. Journal of Linguistics. 581: 423–457. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Visser, Fredericus Th. 1973. An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Part III. 2nd Half: Syntactical Units with Two and with More Verbs. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wada, Naoaki. 2002. “A Comparative Study of the English Present Perfect and the German Perfekt with Special Reference to their Differences in Co-occurrence with Adverbials Referring to a Definite Time”. English Linguistics 191: 335–365. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Walker, Marilyn A., Joshi, Aravind K., and Prince, Ellen F., eds. 1998. Centering Theory in Discourse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Walker, Jim. 2008. “The Strange Phenomenon of the Footballer’s Perfect”. In Girard-Gillet, Geneviève, ed. Etrange/Etranger: Etudes de Linguistique Anglaise. C.I.E.R.E.C. Travaux 137, Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 21–32.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013b. “The Present Perfect and Definite Temporal Adverbials: Reference Grammars and Corpus Evidence”. English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 101: 9–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. The Present Perfect in World Englishes: Charting Unity and Diversity. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English Dialect Grammar. Oxford: Henry Frowde.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wynne, Terence Stewart. 2000. The Present Perfect: A Corpus-Based Investigation. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Stirling.
Yao, Xinyue. 2013. “Pragmatic Interpretation of the English Present Perfect”. Linguistics 511: 993–1018. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue