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The coding of perfect meaning in African, Asian and Caribbean Englishes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2017

CRISTINA SUÁREZ-GÓMEZ
CRISTINA SUÁREZ-GÓMEZ*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Languages, University of the Balearic Islands, Ctra. de Valldemossa, km. 7.5, 07122 Palma (Balearic Islands), Spaincristina.suarez@uib.es
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Abstract

The perfect in World Englishes has attracted much attention recently, especially from a semasiological perspective, in which the analytic have + participle is analysed in comparison with the synthetic preterite. This article intends to achieve a more holistic picture of the expression of perfect meaning in World Englishes, which allows us to identify how perfect meaning is expressed in all pragmatic contexts. In this study, all the occurrences of ten high-frequency verbs are examined in order to single out those expressing perfect meaning. The corpus (8.8m words in total) includes ten components of the International Corpus of English: eight Outer Circle varieties from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, and two reference varieties: British and American English. The relevant examples are tabulated across variables such as presence of adverbials, type of perfect meaning, lexical verb, mode, text type and evolutionary stage. The results show that the envelope of variation is much wider than the one traditionally acknowledged in current grammars of English, and that type of meaning, lexical verb or text type are crucial determiners in the choice of particular forms to express perfect meaning. By contrast, mode or evolutionary stage does not seem to have a bearing on the differences between varieties.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 509 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I am indebted to Elena Seoane for her help with earlier versions of this article, and two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and valuable comments. I am also grateful to Bernd Kortmann for his observations as editor of the journal. Any errors remain my sole responsibility. For generous financial support, I am grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Grant No. FFI2014-53930-P).

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