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The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English
A corpus-based study of grammatical change
This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling, contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 114] 2024. xvii, 235 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 14 February 2024
Published online on 14 February 2024
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- List of abbreviations | pp. xi–xii
- List of tables | pp. xiii–xiv
- List of figures | pp. xv–xvi
- Preface and acknowledgements | pp. xvii–xviii
- Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–17
- Chapter 2. Conceptual framework | pp. 18–49
- Chapter 3. The diachronic background | pp. 50–66
- Chapter 4. Cross-linguistic variation in tense-aspect systems | pp. 67–88
- Chapter 5. General patterns of variation and change in the present perfect and preterite | pp. 89–109
- Chapter 6. Major conditioning factors of change | pp. 110–135
- Chapter 7. Additional factors: The progressive aspect and temporal adverbials | pp. 136–161
- Chapter 8. Internal and external motivations of change | pp. 162–194
- Chapter 9. Conclusion | pp. 195–204
- References | pp. 205–222
- Appendix | p. 223
- Name index | pp. 225–226
- Language index | pp. 229–230
- Subject index | pp. 231–235
“This excellent book about the English perfect and preterite is an exemplary study that skilfully combines classical philological techniques with cutting-edge corpus linguistics and statistical methods, so it comes highly recommended.”
Bozhil Hristov, University of Sofia, in English Language and Linguistics, 2025.
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