Elena Seoane

Re-assessing the Present Perfect

The development of the have-perfect is often given as a prime example of a grammaticalization path. The generally accepted account of the development of the English [have + past participle] construction is that it changed from a possessive-resultative construction into a temporal-aspectual construction with perfect-anterior meaning at some time in the Old English period. This study seeks to test the hypothesis that a semantic shift from resultative to perfect-anterior meaning can be observed in early English data. It is based on corpus data from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. All instances of [hæbb+ past participle] are categorized according to their meaning, and implications for possible source structures of the have-perfect are discussed. Finally, a look on Present-Day English helps to sound a note of caution on drawing conclusions from singular examples.

They have published a new cultural policy that just come out: competing forms in spoken and written New Englishes

This paper aims to assess the variation found in the forms used to express present perfect meaning in spoken and written East and South-East Asian Englishes, those from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and India, as represented in the ICE (International Corpus of English) corpora. A preliminary analysis of three million words of these spoken New Englishes (using a parallel corpus of British English as a benchmark corpus) reveals the use of different variants in contexts where Present-day Standard British English favours the presence of have + past participle (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 143), namely contexts in which recent past is expressed using just, experiential meaning with ever and never, and resultative meaning with yet (Suarez-Gomez and Seoane 2011; cf. also Miller 2000: 327-331). In this paper we gauge the impact of this variation in written New Englishes in the same contexts, in order to identify the differences between spoken and written modes of production in the expression of the perfect, as compared to spoken and written British English, and to see the extent to which the alternative forms found in spoken New Englishes have spread to written New Englishes. The results show that such alternative forms also occur in the written language, and thus confirm a structural change, since they would represent consolidated variants within the perfect paradigm in these Asian Englishes.

Voice Alternation and Authorial Presence: Variation across Disciplinary Areas in Academic English:

This paper examines voice alternation, that is, variation between the active and passive voice in academic Englishes. The focus is on differences regarding degrees of author involvement. A previous study on the use of be-passives in fifteen varieties of academic English (Hundt, Schneider & Seoane 2016) found voice alternation to be very similar in both contact and native (ENL) varieties of English, with only American English showing a pronounced tendency towards a more frequent use of actives. A more fine-grained analysis, however, revealed highly significant interdisciplinary variation: whereas in the hard sciences the default option to express a transitive event is the passive voice, in the soft sciences, preference is often given to the active. In this paper we do not compare varieties of English but concentrate on ENL data from the entire academic sections of ICE corpora (International Corpus of English) as a whole in order to uncover the functional role of actives and passives across disciplinary areas with regard to authorial presence. The results indicate that the differences attested do not correlate with differences in authorial involvement (We discovered this versus This was discovered) since texts remain equally impersonal. Other factors, such as the increasing informalization observed in various genres, will have to be contemplated in any comprehensive study of the rhetoric of science.

2. The to-infinitival perfect: A study of decline

The English to-infinitival perfect (as in She claims to have seen him) has not received the same attention as the present perfect. In this paper we examine its changing use in written American English over the last 200 years, using data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). This reveals a reduction of about 80 % over this period, against a baseline of other past-referring forms (present perfect and past tense verbs). Secondly, we examine contexts of decline, focusing on the most frequent verb collocates of the to-infinitival perfect in COHA (such as claim in the example above) on the premise that these collocates identify the semantic contexts in which the to-infinitival perfect may be used. Collocates are divided into subgroups based on semantic and grammatical criteria, including possible alternation patterns to the to-infinitival perfect. This procedure exposes a rich variation in the behaviour of both subgroups and individual verbs.