Aoristic drift and narrative perfect in early modern English: a functional approach.

Abstract

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern English the have-perfect in spoken register was gradually developing perfective semantics and that it followed the stages of generalization of meaning depending on the degree of event remoteness. Investigation of the instances where the have-perfect is used in narrative passages shows that the have-perfect in such contexts does not lose its pragmatic component of current relevance but is employed to highlight a crucial event out of a chain of past events. The paper proposes the hypothesis that the main mechanism preventing the have-perfect from further aoristicization is the operation of syntactic analogy within the syntactic paradigm of the present perfect, which had already fully developed by the time of Early Modern English.

En el estudio actual, los datos de A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) se utilizan para considerar contextos con los adverbios have-perfect y temporales del tiempo pasado definido, como ayer, anoche, hace. El análisis de datos se realiza en el marco de un enfoque basado en el uso, que da evidencia a la hipótesis de que en el inglés moderno temprano el have-perfect en el registro hablado estaba desarrollando gradualmente una semántica perfectiva y que seguía las etapas de generalización del significado en función de la grado de lejanía del evento. La investigación de los casos en los que el tener perfecto se usa en pasajes narrativos muestra que el tener perfecto en tales contextos no pierde su componente pragmático de relevancia actual, sino que se emplea para resaltar un evento crucial de una cadena de eventos pasados.