The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English

Download or read book The Present Perfect and the Preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English written by Xinyue Yao and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Drawing on neo-Gricean pragmatics, it proposes a novel and principled analysis of the verb forms’ context-independent meanings and context-dependent inferences. State-of-the-art corpus linguistic methods are used to track their functional changes over two and a half centuries. The book presents new evidence of grammatical change and offers a compelling, contact-based account of regional variation. It brings together the insights of various fields, including formal semantics, historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and variationist sociolinguistics.