Cover not available

In:The Perfect Volume: Papers on the perfect
Edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd
[Studies in Language Companion Series 217] 2021
► pp. 461–478

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 18
The functions of the auxiliary ‘have’ in Australian English vivid narratives

 | The University of Western Australia
 | The University of Western Australia
Published online: 9 July 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.18rit
Abstract
The present chapter builds on earlier work showing that the Present Perfect (PP) in Australian English (AusE) narratives and police media reports has acquired some of the functions of the Simple Past (SP). It focuses more specifically on subject-auxiliary ellipsis in sequences of non-standard PP clauses with the aim of better understanding auxiliary scope in such segments. Our data are taken from three corpora of oral narratives and one corpus of written media reports. We argue that the auxiliary, in its full or cliticized form, serves as a marker of saliency, highlighting a speaker’s subjectivity, and that it has acquired discourse segmenting functions for some speakers. Both increased subjectivity and widening of scope are consistent with principles of semantic change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The PP in Australian English
    • 2.2Non-standard participles and past forms in English varieties
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Description of corpora
    • 3.2Analysis of verb forms in clauses with elided subject following a non-standard PP clause
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
References
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2011. Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: The case of the past tense sang vs sung . English Language and Linguistics 15(1): 85–112. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. The varieties of English spoken in the southeast of England: Morphology and syntax. In Varieties of English, 1: The British Isles, Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upton (eds), 440–462. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Asher, Nicholas & Lascarides, Alex. 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere & Pagliuca, William. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form [Typological Studies in Language 9]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Slobin, Dan. 1982. Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense. Language 58(2): 265–289. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caudal, Patrick & Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2012. On the discourse behaviour of the Australian present perfect: Perfective uses in police media reports. Cahiers Chronos 25: 69–89.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Study [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 37]. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1986. Tense and time reference: From meaning to interpretation in the chronological structure of a text. Journal of Literary Semantics 15: 12–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Condoravdi, Cleo & Deo, Ashwini. 2014. Aspect shifts in Indo-Aryan and trajectories of semantic change. In Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface, Chiara Gianollo, Agnes Jäger & Doris Penka (eds), 261–291. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eide, Kristin Melum. 2016. Finiteness, inflection and the syntax your morphology can afford. In Finiteness Matters. On Finiteness-Related Phenomena in Natural Languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 231], Kristin Melum Eide (ed.), 121–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eisikovits, Edina. 1987. Variation in the lexical verb in inner-Sydney English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 7(1): 1–24. 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
Engel, Dulcie & Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2000. The use of the present perfect in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20(2): 119–140. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1990. Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fryd, Marc. 1998. Present perfect et datation: Une dérive aoristique? In Regards sur l’Aspect [Cahiers Chronos 2], Andrée Borillo, Carl Vetters & Marcel Vuillaume (eds), 29–50. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, Martin. 1982. The “past simple” and the “present perfect” in Romance. In Studies in the Romance Verb, Nigel Vincent & Martin Harris (eds), 42–70. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kamp, Hans, Van Genabith, Josef & Reyle, Uwe. 2011. Discourse representation theory. In Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Vol. 15, Dov Gabbay (ed.), 124–394. Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kamp, Hans & Reyle, Uwe. 1993. From Discourse to Logic: An Introduction to Model-Theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, William & Waletzky, Joshua. 1967. Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In Essays in the Verbal and Visual Arts, June Helm (ed.), 12–44. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society 1(1): 97–120. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mittwoch, Anita. 2008. The English resultative perfect and its relationship to the experiential perfect and the simple past tense. Linguistics and Philosophy 31: 323–351. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pawley, Andrew. 2008. Australian vernacular English: Some grammatical characteristics. In Varieties of English, 3: The Pacific and Australasia, Kate Burridge & Bernd Kortmann (eds), 362–397. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Portner, Paul. 2003. The (temporal) semantics and (modal) pragmatics of the perfect. Linguistics and Philosophy 26: 459–510. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York NY: Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richard, Sophie. 2018. Tense/Aspect Variation and the Present Perfect in Australian English Narratives: Sociolinguistic Constraints and Discourse-pragmatic Functions. PhD dissertation, The University of Western Australia.
. 2017. Tense variation in Australian English narratives: Patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. Paper presented at the 2017 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. University of Sydney, Australia, 4–7 December.
Richard, Sophie & Rodríguez Louro, Celeste. 2016. Narrative-embedded variation and change: The sociolinguistics of the Australian English narrative present perfect. In Re-assessing the Present Perfect, Valentin Werner, Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez-Gómez (eds), 119–146. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richard, Sophie. 2015. The present perfect in Australian English narratives: Some preliminary sociolinguistic insights. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Mark Harvey & Alexis Antonia (eds), 29–49. Callaghan NSW: University of Newcastle.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rickford, John & Théberge Rafal, Christine. 1996. Preterite had + V-ed in the narratives of African-American preadolescents. American Speech 71(3): 227–254. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2012. Perfect, tense and aspect. In The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, Robert Binnick (ed.), 881–907. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases. Journal of Pragmatics 42(12): 3400–3417. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ritz, Marie-Eve & Engel, Dulcie. 2008. Vivid narrative use and the present perfect in spoken Australian English. Linguistics 46(1): 131–160. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2007. Perfect change: Synchrony meets diachrony. In Historical Linguistics 2005: Selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 31 July–5 August 2005 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 284], Joseph Salmons & Shannon Dubenion-Smith (eds), 133–147. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Ritz, Marie-Eve. 2014. Stories down under: Tense variation at the heart of Australian English narratives. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34(4): 549–565. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2002. Regional variation in the English verb qualifier system. English language and Linguistics 6(1): 17–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. Tense variation in narrative. Language 57(1): 45–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Carlota. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Dasher, Richard. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2010. Revisiting subjectivization and intersubjectivization. In Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte & Hubert Cuyckens (eds), 29–70. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa. 1979. The conversational historical present alternation. Language 55(1): 168–182. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Howe, Chad
2021. Auxiliary reduction in secondary grammaticalization. In The Perfect Volume [Studies in Language Companion Series, 217], ► pp. 439 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue