The Present Perfect and Definite Temporal Adverbials: Reference Grammars and Corpus Evidence

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to assess the adequacy of how the grammatical status of the present perfect (PP) is established in three reference grammars of English (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston and Pullum 2002). I propose that the categorizations both as aspect and as tense as presented in these grammars have their inherent weaknesses and are particularly deficient when data from varieties other than British or American English is included. To test this assumption, I will analyze PP occurrences extracted from the International Corpus of English (ICE) appearing in contexts that have traditionally been considered ungrammatical or at least odd. One such context is the co-occurrence of the PP with definite temporal adverbials. In this case, the PP is used like a simple past, which may be taken as evidence for the tense status of the PP and will therefore be the focal point of the analysis.