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Published 2024.
This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. As a corpus-based study of ...
Published 2024.
This book examines developments in the use of the present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and contemporary English, with a focus on American and British English. As a corpus-based study of grammatical change, it is innovative in the following aspects: Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the two verb forms' context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences; it employs state-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods (e.g., mixed-effect logistic regression and random forests) to track the verb forms' functional changes over two and a half centuries; it uncovers new evidence both in favour of and against well-known pathways of grammatical change; it offers a compelling, contact-based account of grammatical differences between American and British English; and it brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.
