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45
The present perfect in British and American English: Has
there been any change, recently?
Marianne Hundt, University of Zurich
Nicholas Smith, University of Salford
1 Introduction
For past-time reference, Present-Day English (PDE) has a choice between the
present perfect (I have seen her) and the simple past tense (I saw her). With tem-
poral adverbials like yesterday or last week, the simple past (SP) is usually
required. Adverbials like since, just and yet tend to be used with a present per-
fect (PP). The distinction between SP and PP is a fairly recent development in
English. Since the distinction was not clear-cut in British English (BrE) when
the first settlers arrived in America, its scarcity in American English (AmE) has
been interpreted as an aspect of colonial lag. Data from late Modern English
indicate that this is not really the case. The long-range, corpus-based study by
Elsness (1997) shows that the PP increases over time but starts decreasing again
from the second half of the eighteenth century. This development is led by AmE,
but the decrease starts from a higher level than in BrE.
Previous corpus-based studies of PDE – whenever they included regional
variation – have consistently shown that the PP is more commonly used in BrE
than in AmE. The American Did you eat? for British Have you eaten? can even
be considered one of the shibboleths of transatlantic grammatical differences
(cf. Strevens 1972: 48; Biber et al. 1999: 463).1 According to Foster (1968:
210), BrE was not following AmE in replacing the PP with the SP in the 1960s:
On another negative note, it is interesting to see that British is so far
firmly opposed to the American habit of bringing a simple past tense
into play when a very recent action is indicated. ... It should perhaps be
added that such syntax is known to Englishmen via the famous ‘Kilroy
was here’, let alone such Hollywood film phrases as ‘I just ate’ and the
ever-recurring ‘So you finally got here’. But they show no tendency to
copy it.
ICAME Journal No. 33
46
Evidence from the Brown family of corpora might show that this is no longer
the case. Elsness (2009: 242), based on the untagged version of the Brown quar-
tet and a study of 20 frequently used verbs, provides preliminary evidence that
the decrease of the PP continues into the second half of the twentieth century.
He points at a regional difference, namely that the decline is slowing down in
AmE and that BrE is approaching the level of AmE. In other words, the two
national varieties appear to be converging in their use of the PP. We will use evi-
dence from the tagged corpora to show whether this is, indeed, the case.
The tone of Foster’s comment is somewhat disparaging. Powell (1990: 484)
is even more outspoken in his condemnation of what is perceived as an ongoing
change in BrE:
Written – and spoken – English is rapidly becoming the tongue of
those who do not know Latin. We are for instance losing – as transat-
lantic English has already lost – the expressive resource of the differ-
ence in English (uniquely among European languages) between the
aorist […] and the perfect […]. The result is English impoverished
because it is English ungrammatical.
If anything, AmE is more conservative than BrE in using the SP with adverbials
that indicate recent relevance; the use of the PP with these adverbials is a more
recent development in the grammaticalisation process. Nevertheless, usage
guides tend to attack the combination of the SP with yet in AmE as ungrammat-
ical (cf. Greenbaum and Whitcut 1988: 783; Webster’s Dictionary of English
Usage 1989: 969; Burchfield 1996: 861).
One strand of evidence, then, indicates a declining use of the PP in English.
But at the same time, we find comments pointing in the opposite direction:
reports of the PP being combined with temporal adverbials that clearly indicate
past time reference:
One interesting example of grammatical variation which may repre-
sent the beginning of a change in the language is the apparently
increasing use of the present perfect construction in conjunction with
expressions of definite past time reference. We may hear utterances
such as And Roberts has played for us last season (implying that he
did so without any kind of break). Most native speakers, it must be
admitted, would find this odd. They would claim that the speaker had
made a mistake. But sentences like this are heard more and more often.
(Hughes et al. 2005: 12f.).
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
47
Hughes et al. (ibid.) claim that these constructions “are heard more and more
often”, so they might be a feature mainly of spoken English. Two twentieth-
century examples from written American texts are quoted by Vanneck (1958:
240) who interprets them as rare cases of hypercorrection. We find anecdotal
evidence of the expanded use of the PP in BrE in various sources (cf. Trudgill
1984: 42; Meyer 1995: 226; Elness 1997: 26; Engel 1998: 131f. and Rastall
1999: 80f.).2 Frequency data, however, is practically never given. Engel (1998)
and Engel and Ritz (2000) give a qualitative analysis of PPs in past-tense
contexts, stressing their particular pragmatic function as framing elements (at
the beginning or end of a newspaper article). Miller (2004: 235) attributes these
PPs in press language to the advent of computer-based publishing and less
rigorous copy-editing. Engel (1998: 141) concludes that the PP is obviously far
from grammaticalising into a tense marker in English.
In the following, we will look at both quantitative and qualitative evidence
on the development of the PP. The macroscopic, quantitative approach will con-
sider the overall frequency of the PP, frequency variation according to text type,
and relative frequencies of the PP and the SP. In the microscopic, qualitative
analyses we will focus on the co-occurrence of the PP and SP with temporal
adverbials. We will use data from both written and spoken corpora of BrE and
AmE (for the corpora included in the study, see Appendix 1).
2 The PP – overall development
2.1 The frequency of the PP in standard BrE and AmE
To retrieve occurrences of the PP in the Brown family corpora, we used the CQP
query software (Christ 1994) on versions of the corpora that had been tagged in
advance for part of speech (POS; see Mair et al. 2002). The two basic elements
of the CQP query are the POS specification for the auxiliary HAVE (in the present
tense) and the past participle. Between these two elements a variety of optional
material is permitted, including:
• adverbs (e.g. quite, recently), negatives (not, n’t) or multiword adverbials
(e.g. of course, in general);
• noun phrases: pronouns or simple NPs consisting of optional premodifiers
(such as determiners, adjectives) and nouns. These typically occur in the
inverted word order of interrogative utterances (Has he arrived? Have the
children eaten yet?)3
Figure 1 gives the overall development of the PP in the Brown family of corpora
expressed as frequencies per million words (pmw):4
ICAME Journal No. 33
48
Figure 1: Development of PP in the Brown-family (frequency pmw)
Log likelihood tests performed on these data show that the overall diachronic
development within both varieties is not significant. However, the general trend
to be observed is that of a slight decrease of PPs in both varieties of English,
which is led by AmE. PPs in AmE started out at a lower level in the 1960s, and
despite the more dramatic decrease in BrE, written AmE in the 1990s still uses
significantly fewer PPs than BrE. So we are dealing with relatively stable
regional variation, overall. The evidence based on the tagged version of the cor-
pora thus does not support Elsness’ (2009) findings, i.e. a narrowing of the gap
between BrE and AmE differences in the use of this grammatical construction.
We now turn to developments in different genres. The results from Table 1
in Appendix 2 are graphically summarized in Figure 2:
4156 4044 3488 3453
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
LOB F-LOB Brown Frown
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
49
Figure 2: Development of PP across genres (frequency pmw)
The tendency towards an overall decrease of PPs is also evident in journalistic
prose in Britain where, this time, it is statistically significant. Newspaper lan-
guage in the US, on the other hand, shows a slight increase of PPs, but this
development is below the level of statistical significance. But why would the PP
increase at all in AmE? Elsness (2009: 234f.) comments on technical change as
a possible explanation:
[…] with modern telecommunications news reporting has changed
drastically since the eighteenth century; in that century news reports
usually centred on events which were quite distant in time, while today
even news reported in print tends to be located in the much more
recent past.
McCawley (1971) coined the term ‘hot news’ perfect for this pragmatically
motivated use of the perfect. Miller (2004: 235) attributes the PPs in press lan-
guage to the advent of computer-based publishing and less rigorous copy-edit-
ing. Engel (1998) gives a qualitative analysis of PPs in past-tense contexts,
stressing their particular pragmatic function as framing elements (at the begin-
ning or end of a newspaper article). She describes this function as ‘scene-setting
before a narrative’. But in our data, resultative PPs in the opening sentences of
6401
2413
5785
2839
4930
1570
4993
2425
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
LOB F-LOB Brown Frown
Press Gen. prose Learned Fiction
ICAME Journal No. 33
50
news reports have not increased: we found 13 in section A of the Brown corpus
and only eight in Frown. In Engel’s data, the PP seems to have been used more
frequently overall. Even if not all of these are resultative PPs, and some may
have been motivated by a co-occurring temporal adverbial such as recently or so
far, the difference between her data and our results is still striking.
Apart from newspaper language, there is a significant decrease in American
general prose. Fictional writing is also an interesting category to look at: we see
an increase of PPs in this genre, which is more dramatic in AmE than in BrE.5
The result of this increase is that fiction writing is coming closer to general
prose in its use of PPs, and the overall differences between text categories are
decreasing in both national varieties. This is again a result that differs markedly
from Elsness’ study (2009) that was based on a sub-set of verbs from the
untagged versions of the corpora: he reports that the present perfect is consis-
tently used much less frequently in fictional writing than in other text categories
in his diachronic study. The development in his data is thus towards a greater
divergence of fictional narrative rather than a convergence. Note, however, that
he investigated fictional narrative separately from fictional dialogue, a distinc-
tion not systematically made in the Brown quartet.
It has to be taken into account that the data in Figure 1/Table 1 have not been
post-edited manually. In the retrieval of PPs, combinations of a modal with have
+ participle were excluded for the obvious reason that they do not have past
tense counterparts. Sometimes, the distance between the modal and auxiliary
have is rather long, so occasional instances of modal constructions slipped
through; these were not manually excluded from the overall counts. Examples
(1) and (2) illustrate such patterns:
(1) What difference would being hatched in an incubator have made to his
life? (FLOB G13)
(2) … he presented a package of reforms to Parliament which would, if
passed, have nullified the movement’s additions to the electorate.
(FLOB J59)
Other instances that are not PP constructions but were not frequent enough to be
manually extracted from the original concordances are illustrated in examples
(3) to (5).
(3) I had much rather have continued a spectator than become an actor.
(FLOB G36)
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
51
(4) Vernon was consummately fond of oysters, Manning’s had been
famous for them since the Civil War. (Brown E11)
(5) Contemporary furniture that is neither Danish nor straight-line modern
but has sculptured pattern, many design facets, warmth, dignity and an
effect of utter comfort and livability. (Brown A29)
The manual analysis of the Brown and Frown corpora showed that, overall, the
number of non-perfect constructions returned by the query was exceedingly
small. So for a comparison of all four corpora, the original concordances were
considered to provide reliable results.
2.2 The PP and the SP
With a decline of PPs in twentieth-century English we might expect a concomi-
tant increase of the SP. But a look at the results in Figure 36 reveals that SPs
have also decreased over time. As a result, when it comes to relative frequencies
of the PP and the SP in BrE and AmE, we are – again – dealing with stable
regional variation rather than ongoing diachronic change:
Figure 3: Development of PP vs. SP in the Brown-family (relative frequency)
It will be interesting to see whether the qualitative analysis of our data will lend
additional support to the idea that variation in the use of the PP in PDE is
regional rather than diachronic.
10.5%
10.4%
8.7%
8.8%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
LOB FLOB Brown Frown
PP
SP
ICAME Journal No. 33
52
3 Co-occurrence with temporal adverbials
Schlüter’s (2006: 143f.) review of previous, corpus-based studies shows that
temporal adverbials are used in fewer than 50 per cent of all PPs, with results
ranging between 45 per cent for AmE and 29 per cent for BrE. The results in
Figure 4 are based on the manual analysis of every fifth example from the origi-
nal concordances.
Figure 4: Co-occurrence of PPs and temporal specification (relative frequencies)
Our results confirm previous findings: the large majority of PPs are used with-
out temporal specification in the immediate context. There are practically no
regional differences in this result and it is a diachronically stable one. The fact
that most PPs are used without a triggering adverbial allows us to account for
fluctuation in the use of the construction. If – as Engel (1998: 132) points out –
the “concept of present relevance is often a subjective interpretation of perti-
nence on the part of the speaker/writer […]”, then ongoing change and/or
regional variation boil down to different or shifting preferences in these subjec-
tive interpretations.
This does not mean, however, that there is no mileage in investigating cases
where the PP and SP tenses are used with temporal adverbials. We will look at
two such co-occurrence phenomena, namely adverbs indicating current rele-
vance (section 3.1) and past tense adverbs (section 3.2).
3.1 Adverbs indicating current relevance
Even with adverbs of current relevance, we find variation in the use of the PP
and SP, as examples (6) and (7) illustrate:
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
LOB FLOB Brown Frown
with temporal spec.
without
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
53
(6) “You look like you just heard a real gasser, Mr Partlow”. (Brown P27)
(7) “He’s just heard from the pathologist who says Mrs Meeker apparently
died from suffocation.” (Brown L15)
For the qualitative analysis of this aspect of variation, we searched for all
instances of the temporal adverbials already, (n)ever, recently and yet to verify
how frequently they would occur with either the PP or the SP in our corpora. We
only included unambiguous cases of temporal reference of these adverbials in
our counts. Another condition was that the SP had to be interchangeable with
the PP (so we excluded instances in which, for example, yet was used in the SP
in contexts of reported speech – which would really be an example of the
present tense use with yet). The results are summarized in Figure 5:7
Figure 5: Relative frequency of SP with temporal adverbials
The qualitative analysis indicates that the SP is generally used more frequently
in our American than in our British data. Moreover, the co-occurrence patterns
of adverbials with the SP appear to be relatively stable in LOB and F-LOB (with
the exception of yet, where the proportion decreases). In Brown and Frown, on
the other hand, the proportion of SP only decreases with (n)ever, whereas with
yet we see a substantial increase between the years 1961 and 1992. It is interest-
ing to note that, due to ongoing change over the past thirty years in AmE, the
previously huge gap between the co-occurrence patterns of already and yet
seems to be closing in written usage. This is not quite the case in spoken
English.
45.5% 88.9%
58.1%
24.3%
52.3%68.8%
60%
40.6%
41.2% 61.6%
48.3%
41%
41.7% 65.5%
47.7%
29.4%
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Brown Frown LOB F-LOB
already
(n)ever
recently
yet
ICAME Journal No. 33
54
Evidence for spoken usage comes from the spontaneous conversations of the
British National Corpus (BNC) and the Longman Corpus of Spoken American
English (LCSAE). The results in Figure 6 are based on sets of 500 random
occurrences of the adverbials; these were manually thinned to those results with
variable usage of PP and SP.8
Figure 6: Relative frequency of SP with temporal adverbials in spoken BrE and AmE (fig-
ures for already and yet are based on Tottie 2002: 51)
Surprisingly, spoken AmE frequently uses the past tense with already, but the
preferred aspect with yet is the PP: “This intra-variety difference is highly sig-
nificant (p. = 0.001, chi-square 54.76, 1 d.f.). It is thus not entirely felicitous to
treat the two adverbs already and yet as having the same effect on the choice of
tense in American English” (Tottie 2002: 51). The results from the spoken data
also run counter to the common perception that yet combines freely with the past
tense in informal AmE: in usage handbooks such as the ones by Burchfield
(³1996), Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988) or Webster’s (1989), comments are
made about the dubious grammaticality of yet with the SP; no such comments
are made in the context of already, despite the fact that it is actually used more
frequently with the SP in AmE. The result that the SP with yet increases in writ-
ten American usage against both spoken evidence and the usage guide wisdom
is thus all the more surprising.
Our corpus data also show that the SP is used with temporal adverbials of
current relevance in spoken BrE as well. The following examples are taken from
8% 2%
21%20% 28%
54%
18%
84%
51%
21%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
BNC LCSAE
already
yet
just
recently
never
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
55
Sampson (2002: 28f.), who points out that they are all, incidentally, produced by
speakers from the South (West) of England:
(8) We’d always get one, we never lost one yet. (BNC, H5H)
(9) Since when did they ever? (BNC, KC4)
(10) She said to me ehm, didn’t count those, didn’t give a re … refund on
those cigarettes yet, I said no. (BNC, KDY)
(11) Did she decide what she’s doing with her money yet? (BNC, KE3)
(12) I never lost mine yet. (BNC, KP4)
(13) Did you put up my red light up yet? (BNC, KP5)
3.2 PPs with past tense adverbials
As pointed out in the introduction, the PP is increasingly used with adverbials
that clearly refer to an event in the past. Occasional instances are also found in
our corpora of written English, but they are so rare that a more detailed fre-
quency breakdown would be inappropriate:
(14) … the contrastingly random, uncoordinated resignations last week of
chairman Lord Sainsbury as well as Jeffrey Tate as principal conductor
have added fuel to the fire of those who claim that the Royal Opera’s
artistic direction is unsure and its structure diffuse. (FLOB A26)
Moreover, this is not really a prototypical example of a combined PP and past
tense adverbial usage: the resignation happened in the past but has current rele-
vance. As Rastall (1999: 81) points out:
The point about such examples is that they show up a potential for a
conflict in the conditions of use of the present perfect in English. The
criterion of ‘current relevance’ to the moment of speaking is quite evi-
dent in all of the cases adduced, but in each case the speaker also
wishes to convey the point in time when the event occurred. […] the
current relevance or newsworthiness of the information may override
the latter consideration [i.e. past time zone for the point in time when
the event occurred].
Co-occurrences of the PP and adverbials that require the SP according to the
usage guides are more commonly found in spoken English, as the following
examples with yesterday from the LCSAE and BNC illustrate:
ICAME Journal No. 33
56
(15) Well it’s worked yesterday (LCSAE)
(16) I haven’t smoked yesterday. (LCSAE)
(17) … so we’ve talked about some of those instances yesterday. (LCSAE)
(18) … I mean, I’ve, I’ve had a <pause> long chat with Anne, we’ve had a
long, erm meeting with Anne <name> yesterday about it, and she’s
gonna start pushing <pause> (BNC, KBD 6028)…
(19) We’ve been out in it yesterday. (BNC, KBE 3003)
(20) Mind you all the questions he’s asked me yesterday I answered.
<pause> (BNC KCM 137)
(21) Anyway <pause> three people have phoned yesterday, we had two
phone calls yesterday, in the morning <pause> … (BNC, KCC 480)
(22) See the A four five’s, er three’s been closed yesterday. (BNC, KCW
1441)
(23) Well we’ve had their director on the phone, phone yesterday <pause>
and more or less demanded his twenty thousand back. (BNC, KB9
3305)
Rastall’s comment helps to explain some of these examples: in (18), for
instance, the results of the chat are of current relevance; others might be
accounted for out of a larger context which we did not investigate. Some occur-
rences, however, are more likely to be due to online language production: (24)
could be interpreted as a blend with an unclear sentence boundary; (25) exem-
plifies the use of a PP instead of a grammatically more ‘correct’ past perfect; in
(26), the adverb could be interpreted as an afterthought.
(24) I’ve been trying to call her yesterday and today uh I’m at a hotel
(LCSAE)
(25) It’s like I haven’t heard it advertised at all until yesterday. (LCSAE)
(26) But I don’t he’s gotten a whole lot done. Yesterday (LCSAE)
The following example from the spoken section of the BNC is an interesting
case of self-correction from a SP to a PP, i.e. in a direction that should normally
be considered ‘ungrammatical’:
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
57
(27) I mean, Ann finished lectures, Ann’s finished lectures yesterday, she’s
a secondary teacher and she doesn’t have a lecture again until after
Christmas. (BNC, KPV 6109)
The current relevance here may be that there will be no further lecture “until
after Christmas”.
4Conclusion
To sum up, the PP is decreasing somewhat in our parallel corpora, but the over-
all trend is not significant within the varieties; we seem thus to be dealing with
relatively stable regional variation rather than ongoing change. The results
obtained on the tagged Brown quartet of corpora thus provide a very different
picture from the one obtained by Elsness (2009), who used the untagged ver-
sions of the same corpora and limited his analysis to a set of frequent verbs.
Typologically, a decrease of the PP in (written) standard English would go
decidedly against the general trend in other Indo-European languages, which
show an increasing use of the PP at the expense of the SP. But the comparison of
the PP with the SP in our family of corpora has shown that the proportion of the
two constructions is stable over time.
When we look at individual genres, we see that there is, however, a signifi-
cant decrease of PPs in British newspaper writing and American general prose –
but there is an increase in fiction writing: the overall effect of this is a decreasing
variability across genres in the use of the PP.
Where there is variation between the two constructions with adverbials that
signal current relevance, the SP is used more often in AmE, as the text books
generally indicate. However, within written AmE, the gap between always and
yet seems to be closing as co-occurrences of the SP decrease with always and
increase with yet.
PPs with past tense adverbials are still rare and usually ‘locally’ triggered.
As our conclusion on this point, we could use Kjellmer’s comment (2003: 18)
on the use of perfect constructions without auxiliary have:
So some of what we are at first likely to regard as simple solecisms in
modern English may still be solecisms, but in that case solecisms with
both a respectable ancestry and some distinguished neighbours and rel-
atives. Whether they will reassert themselves as legitimate in the lan-
guage, unlikely as it seems, remains to be seen.
ICAME Journal No. 33
58
Miller (2004: 235) rightly points out that PPs with specific past time adverbs
have a long history in English (going back to Middle English), but that – as long
as we lack diachronic data – it is impossible to assert whether modern specimens
of the constructions are simply a continuation of this usage or whether they have
re-emerged. He claims that pragmatic requirements might serve as a good expla-
nation for them having remained a latent option in English:
When speakers refer to an event in the past they are under pragmatic
pressure to enable listeners to locate the event accurately in past time.
This is achieved by producing an appropriate adverb referring to a spe-
cific past time. There is no reason to suppose that this pragmatic pres-
sure has ever ceased to apply and no reason to suppose that the
construction is returning to English after a period of absence.
So, ultimately, what we are dealing with is another case of – relatively – stable
layering in the tense and aspect system of English.
Notes
1. Note, however, that the pattern is also found in Scottish English (Trudgill
and Hannah 2002: 95), Irish English (Engel and Ritz 2000: 126) and
(White) South African English (Lass 1987: 352).
2. It is not limited to BrE and AmE, as comments in Bauer (1994 on NZE),
Engel and Ritz (2000: 130, on AusE) or Trudgill and Hannah (2002: 134,
on Indian English) show.
3. The search query was as follows:
[pos = "VAH0|VAHZ"] [pos ="R.*|MD|XX" & pos !="RL"]{0,4} [pos =
"AT.*|APPGE"]? [pos = "JJ.*|N.*"]? [pos ="PPH1|PP.*S.*|PPY|NP.*|D.*|
NN.*"]{0,2} [pos = "R.*|MD|XX"]{0,4} [pos = "V.*N"]; where [ …] is a
single word token, ‘pos’ = part of speech, "VAH0|VAHZ" (in the first posi-
tion) are the tags for auxiliary HAVE in the present tense, "V.*N" (at the end)
represents any past participle form, and the tags in-between represent
optional adverbial and noun phrase sequences. In PPs, finite auxiliary have
is sometimes omitted, but this is definitely a feature of informal spoken lan-
guage use (see Kjellmer 2003: 18).
4. A table with raw frequencies is provided in Appendix 2.
5. Elsness (2009) shows that the present perfect is consistently used much less
frequently in fictional writing than in other text categories in his long-term
diachronic study. The development in his data is towards a greater diver-
gence of fictional narrative rather than a convergence. Note, however, that
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
59
he investigated fictional narrative separately from fictional dialogue, a dis-
tinction not systematically made in the Brown quartet.
6. The raw frequencies for this figure can be found in Table 2 in Appendix 2.
7. For absolute frequencies, see Table 4 in Appendix 2.
8. For a native speaker of BrE, many of the AmE sentences would be consid-
ered ungrammatical. The analysis therefore used a more neutral World-
Englishes view.
9. The right-hand column gives a measure of how significant the difference
between the two corpora is, *, ** and *** showing progressively higher
levels of significance. We tested for significance with the log-likelhood test
which has the following critical values for significance: p < 0.05 – critical
value = 3.84 (marked as *); p < 0.01 – critical value = 6.63 (marked as **);
p < 0.001 – critical value = 10.83 (marked as ***).
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Appendix 1
Corpora used in this study
Appendix 2
Table 1: Frequencies of the PP in BrE and AmE9
Brown
LOB
Frown
F-LOB
The Brown family
Press,
General Prose,
Learned,
Fiction
the Brown (University) Corpus
the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus
the Freiburg-Brown Corpus
the Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus
the four corpora above, regarded as a group
Four subcorpora into which the corpora of the Brown family are
divided.
BNC
the BNC demographic
subcorpus (BNCdemog)
British National Corpus
a part of the BNC, consisting of largely spontaneous spoken English
discourse by 153 individuals and their interlocutors, sampled from
the population of the UK on demographic principles
LCSAE the Longman Corpus of Spoken American English
LOB F-LOB
Subcorpus raw freq. pmw raw freq. pmw change as
% of LOB
Press 1138 6401 1031 5785 *-9.6%
Gen. prose 1840 4438 1741 4230 -4.7%
Learned 599 3727 571 3566 -4.3%
Fiction 619 2413 730 2839 **17.6%
Total 4196 4156 4073 4044 -2.7%
Brown Frown
Subcorpus raw freq. pmw raw freq. pmw change as
% of Brown
Press 882 4930 894 4993 1.3%
Gen. prose 1678 4016 1407 3385 ***-15.7%
Learned 575 3573 574 3557 -0.5%
The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?
63
Table 2: Relative frequencies of the PP and SP in BrE and AmE
Table 3: Co-occurrence of PPs and temporal specification
Table 4: Relative frequency of PP : SP in the Brown family of corpora
Fiction 403 1570 624 2425 ***54.4%
Total 3538 3488 3499 3453 -1.0%
LOB FLOB Brown Frown
PP 4.196 (10.5%) 4.073 (10.4%) 3.538 (8.7%) 3.499 (8.8%)
SP 35.821 (89.5%) 35.276 (89.6%) 37.223 (91.3%) 36.250 (91.2%)
Total 40.017 39.349 40.761 39.749
LOB FLOB Brown Frown
with temporal spec. 275 (33.4%) 248 (31.7%) 240 (34%) 211 (31.5%)
without 548 (66.6%) 535 (68.3%) 466 (66%) 459 (68.5%)
Total 823 783 706 670
Brown Frown LOB F-LOB
already 69 : 60 63 : 69 97 : 68 70 : 50
(n)ever 130 : 321 131 : 289 146 : 234 126 : 239
recently 31 : 43 32 : 48 45 : 42 46 : 42
yet 28 : 9 19 : 13 36 : 25 36 : 15
