Developments in the Use of the English Present Perfect

Abstract

This article examines developments in the use of the present perfect (PP) with the auxiliary have in standard British and American English from 1750 to the present day, drawing data from the drama section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Multivariate analyses were conducted to examine changes in the type of linguistic contexts that favor the choice of the construction over its main competitor, the simple past tense. A number of significant changes were identified, including a stronger tendency for the have-PP to occur in temporally specified and negative contexts, and to become less favored by transitive verbs and events with direct results (e.g., break, kill, lose, arrive). The findings are interpreted as an indication of a slow functional reconfiguration that contours the construction’s continued grammaticalization. It is suggested that there has been, since the Late Modern English period, a gradual shift in the nature of the construction’s “current relevance,” from the persistence of the present result of a past event to the situational constitution of the “extended-now” interval.