Sum: Am Eng past for perfect

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The other day I posted a query about the American use of
the simple past where other varieties require the perfect.
I received a number of helpful replies.  Werner Abraham
has already posted a comment to the list.  There follows
a summary of the main points made by those who responded
to me privately.  I'll just add here that the Americans
who responded agreed at once that my examples of the past
tense were entirely natural, and one of them expressed surprise
that I regarded them as non-standard, or at least as
unacceptable in edited American English.  Well, I'm American,
too, but everybody assures me I speak 1912 English.

1. The idea that the American use of the simple past in these
contexts represents a survival, rather than an innovation,
is indeed taken seriously.

2. Precisely this idea was put forward by Visser; see sections
792, 806, 807.

3. Much the same idea has been defended by Charles-James Bailey,
and is probably to be found in his publications, though I have
no reference.  Try orlapubs at ilhawaii.net .  Bailey reportedly sees
the English perfect as a declining form propped up to some extent
by a Romance superstrate.  [This view would certainly be in line
with Bailey's general views about the history of English -- LT.]

4. Dulcie Engel at the University of Wales, Swansea
(d.engel at swansea.ac.uk) and Marie-Eva Ritz at the University
of Western Australia (mritz at ecel.uwa.edu.au) have been working
on this topic for a while, especially from an Australian angle.
They have been reporting their findings at conferences, and
they will probably be publishing their work soon in the
Australian Journal of Linguistics.

5. Anders Ahlqvist at the National University of Ireland, Galway,
<Ahlqvist at nuigalway.ie) has just written a paper on this topic
which reaches conclusions rather different from either of the
suggestions in my posting.  This should be out in a few weeks;
meanwhile, a draft may be available from the author.

6. David Denison has written about this in section 3.3.7.3 in
his article 'Syntax' in Suzanne Romaine (ed.) (1998), The
Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 4, {I1776-1997},
CUP, pp. 92-329 (especially page 192).

7. Rissanen in vol. 3 of the CHEL also has something to say
about this (page 225); important references there include
Vanneck (1955) and Visser.

8. Elsness (1989) (sorry; no further details) provides elicitation
data supporting the trans-Atlantic difference and finds that the
present perfect is in statistical decline as measured by snapshots
at 200-year intervals in a diachronic corpus.

9. All of Italian, German and Spanish exhibit great regional
variation in the use of the simple preterite and the compound
perfect, with one or the other often regionally restricted in use
or even lost altogether.

10. The frequent identity in English of the past tense and
the perfect participle, which in vernacular English often applies
to more verbs than in modern standard English, can blur the
formal distinction in casual speech, as in 'I've seen it' versus
'I seen it'.

My thanks to Anders Ahlqvist, Bobby Bryant, Richard Coates, Alan Dench,
David Denison, Richard Hogg, Paolo Ramat, Theo Vennemann, Benji Wald and
Roger Wright.  I have forwarded the responses to my colleague who
was interested in this.

Damn useful thing, this list.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)