It has been some time now since I last posted a tranche of my ongoing study of English verb forms. Since then, I have been broadening and deepening my research and I apologize if this section is therefore somewhat weighty and academic. The study is still very much work in progress and I am posting it here mainly to garner feedback and criticism.

The previous posts in this series can be accessed at

https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/the-truth-about-english-verbs-part-i/

https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/the-truth-about-english-verbs-part-2/

https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/the-truth-about-english-verbs-part-3/

The Truth about English Verbs Part 4a. The Vagaries of the Present Perfect.

Thomson and Martinet’s Practical English Grammar Exercises (1986) books represent, in some respects, a more interesting approach to English verb-forms than Murphy’s grammar and other standard textbooks, albeit a more daunting one.

These authors provide long lists of exercises in which the learner has to decide between two (or sometimes three) contrasting forms. What I have always found interesting about this particular approach is the way that it undermines itself in an intriguing manner that will pique the interest of an open-minded learner or teacher.

In a large number of cases, either choice could be valid depending on how the context is interpreted, although one of the alternative contexts is usually somewhat bizarre. Learners are thus being asked not to decide between right and wrong usage but to judge the most likely context in which the phrase might occur. This is at once a more challenging and more fruitful exercise; although few teachers guide students to use the resource in this way.

In so far as examples in grammar and text books are almost always devoid of broader context, they are generally of very dubious pedagogical value, since it is precisely the broader context that determines the choice of form and the meaning it conveys. As far back as 1949, Otto Jespersen was aware of this shortcoming. His critique of conventional language teaching is still sadly very relevant today and has been repeated by Michael Lewis and the lexical approach movement.

Meaning is determined by a combination of imitation and negotiation. In real life interaction, people pick evolving structures up naturally by listening to and copying one another. In grammar books, on the other hand, one is often forced to choose starkly between, for example: “The clock stopped” and “The clock has stopped.” And, more often than not, the ‘explanation’ of the ‘correct’ answer is something along the lines of a prescription against the Present Perfect being used with a time phrase, or a closed time period, or for events of no present relevance. All of these prescriptive/explanations turn out, however, on closer inspection, to be confusing and at best only partially true.

I shall start this discussion of the non-binary nature of the distinctions between English verb forms with the Present Perfect and move on to the Present Continuous, in the second section of this chapter. This is in part because the Present Perfect, as outlined above, is more common than the Present Continuous in natural discourse. But it is also, I think, a clearer case to argue, and one to which I have a special emotional attachment.

If it is any comfort to language learners, linguists find it as difficult to explain the present-day use of the form as learners do to use it. This may well be no coincidence.

I remember the joy I felt in the early 1990s when the ‘true’ nature of the Present Perfect/Past Simple distinction was revealed to me by a learned and inspiring teacher uncowed by centuries of misinformation. And long thereafter I presented it proudly to students, as if it were some magical revelation.

Up to that time, or shortly before it, I should add, it was common for grammar books to explain the English Present Perfect in terms of the use of the equivalent form in the languages of continental Europe. This was because, until that time, it was more common to study the grammar of ‘foreign’ languages than that of English.

The traditional explanation tended to revolve around the concept of a ‘finished action,’ as suggested by the use of the term ‘perfect’ (which is opposed to an ‘imperfect’ in Latinate and other European languages, but not in modern English). I persist in the use of this misnomer only because there is no commonly agreed alternative and many other terms proposed (‘past anterior’ for example) only narrow the concept further in an ultimately self-defeating and misleading fashion.

Even Michael Swan (1980), who is aware of the complexity of the subject, introduces his section on the Present Perfect by stating that “[t]he present perfect simple is often used to talk about finished actions and events.”

He also presents a number of ‘typical mistakes’. It is worth quoting some of these verbatim, to show how such judgments, if not outright wrong in the first place, can date over time. My more modern feeling about each phrase appears in square brackets.

“I can’t go on holiday because I broke my leg.” [Not wrong but a bit clumsy and ambiguous. It could be construed to imply either that my leg is broken now or that I broke my leg on a previous visit to that location and am wary of repeating the experience.]

“According to latest reports, government forces pushed back the rebels and retook the town.” [Absolutely nothing wrong with this sentence and it may sound more normal to US ears than the same phrase using the present perfect would]

“Who has given you that lovely necklace?” [This deviates slightly from conventional usage but would not sound unnatural in certain quite common contexts (e.g. seeing the necklace for the first time, or while opening presents at a birthday or Christmas party).]

“I’ve seen Mary yesterday” [This still sounds wrong when looked at written down and shorn of specific context, although it could seem quite natural in spoken language, if there is a pause between ‘Mary’ and ‘yesterday.’]

All of these, I should add, are finished actions, whether or not the Present Perfect is considered to be the ‘correct’ form.

The finished action explanation had by this time (the late 80s and early 90s) been largely replaced by a more sophisticated one involving open frames of reference (i.e. time frames that include the present) and distinguishing between time of action and time of reference.

This was the explanation that I initially learnt and which excited me so much intellectually. It appears both to correct a misconception and put the debate to rest and is still widely accepted by language teaching professionals today.

 

I soon, however, became increasingly troubled by this apparently watertight binary explanation. It seemed not to cover a wide enough range of examples from real-life usage.

 

The use of the Present Perfect form in modern English is very different from that of similar forms in other major Western European languages. In French, the passé composé is generally used to refer to the past, with the passé simple being relegated to formal literary contexts. In German, the synthetic form of the past is used more widely, but still restricted to clearly narrative contexts detached from the everyday life of the speaker. In Spanish, the perfect aspect is less widely used and restricted to very recent events. In Portuguese, the equivalent aspect is used even more exclusively to refer to phenomena that have been increasingly frequent in the recent past. Swedish, Dutch and Italian usage broadly follows the example of French or German to varying degrees. None of them even remotely resemble English in this respect. The peculiarities of the English Present Perfect would seem to be an outlier.

In the English of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period a similar pattern to that of German and French seemed to be under way. But this was cut short, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries by a renewed emphasis on the strong synthetic preterit. At the same time, the Present Perfect seems to have developed a range of—sometimes contradictory—specific uses and has been enjoying a steady rise, since the early 20^th century. It has even come to ‘infect’ other languages; with English-style present perfects now commonly used in academic texts written in Spanish and Portuguese.

More recent linguistic debate has tended to argue over whether the choice of one verb form over another conveys an emotional/pragmatic or rational/temporal distinction. Another binary distinction. In practice, however, language users tend to be interested in both and the relative importance of one or the other varies over time and is determined by historical circumstances.

It is no surprise, therefore, that in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, English backed off from the trend towards a periphrastic preterit that was prevalent on the rest of the continent. And it is no accident that this coincided with the rise of Britain as an imperial and industrial power. English speakers, at the highest and the lowest of levels, were keen to distinguish themselves from their European rivals, more attuned to rational than emotional distinctions, and more inclined to look back to the history of their own native language.

The situation is complicated by the still élite status of Latin and Greek at this time. Latin lacks a preterit, using the perfective for this purpose; but Greek makes a crystal clear distinction between Aorist and Perfect and this may have disturbed trends in English at the time, especially among social climbers wishing to appear educated. There is a certain prejudice even today, in élite circles, against Latin and in favor of Greek.

The recrudescence of the Present Perfect in Present-Day English may be explained in part by a return to a more emotional, now-centered manner of relating to others and to the world, in part by the sheer usefulness of the emerging distinction to refer to more complex industrial processes.

The present perfect is at once a more polite and emotionally engaging way of referring to actions in an economic climate increasingly dominated by the services sector and a way of being more objectively precise about the position of a product in a chain of production. Imagine a dumbly insolent worker stating “I packed the boxes,” compared to one eager to please his or her bosses, who proclaims “I have packed the boxes,” with a winning smile.

In everyday discourse, the two apparent binary opposites frequently converge.

Slobin’s study (1994) of the acquisition of the English present perfect in children notes that “[t]he present perfect is first used by both child and mother,… in contexts where the completion of one action provides the grounds for a subsequent action.”

Examples might include a mother admonishing a child, “You have behaved badly, and will be punished,” or a child claiming “I have eaten my dinner; can I go out to play now.” In both cases an emotional appeal to another is combined with a clearly routinized procedural view of the world.

Slobin advances this thesis and others have followed him in an attempt to show that the Present Perfect is somehow ‘naturally’ tied to a rational/temporal or emotional/subjective function or both. I advance almost the opposite thesis, that this is evidence of how historically determined linguistic features are present (perhaps especially so) in the very earliest stages of acquisition or (as I would prefer to term it) indoctrination.

Hübler, a clever and subtle analyst of grammatical features, comes to much the same conclusion (1998), but fails to hook it up with the historical context, as academic linguists (bound by their foundational credo of the arbitrariness of language change over time) inevitably tend not to.

Hübler cleverly counters, for example, the easy language teacher’s truism that the present perfect is not used with a time phrase, even when the dictum is tightened up by the use of a term such as ‘strong past adverb’.

Statements in Present-Day English that combine a present perfect form of the verb and a strong past adverb may be regarded prescriptively as deviant, but are sufficiently common in descriptive terms and not perceived as dysfunctional that they cannot be dismissed as nonsense.

Hübler presents as an example, the statement “I have forgotten her long ago,” in which the speaker is both appealing subjectively to the listener with the ‘have’ and insisting on the objectivity of closure with the ‘long ago’. There is no contradiction between the two intentions. I present a similar, more complex example from political discourse, in my blog post Governor Brewer’s Present Perfect. (Webb, 2014)

A Brief History of Theories of the Present Perfect

1. Older grammar books tend to explain the Present Perfect in terms of a distinction between a finished and an unfinished action. This is simply wrong and the idea probably comes from a misapplication of the rule for other Germanic languages and possibly Ancient Greek.
2. The more sophisticated ‘modern’ explanation (the one I was first taught in the early 1990s) involves the concept of open and closed time-frames in relation to the present moment, with the Present Perfect being used for those that are open and the Past Simple for those that are closed. This is a subtle and elegant explanation, but does not really cover all examples and fails to account for language change.
3. A double explanation. The Present Perfect can be seen to be used in two types of situation. One in which the time frame is open (the ‘up to now’ explanation) and one in which, although the time frame is closed, the consequences of the action are still of current relevance. The latter can be seen as an extension of the second theory, although historical evidence does not really bear this out. See below.
4. The rule of thumb. The Present Perfect cannot be used with an adverb of fixed time. This is not entirely true, although some grammarians have listed adverbs which can be used with the PP and those which can be used with the PS. This explanation, however, despite its apparent simplicity, can be confusing and fails to account for numerous deviations from the ‘rule’ and for the many cases where no adverbial expression is used.
5. Reason or emotion. More recent studies have concentrated on debating whether the decision to use the PP or PS is primarily a rational or an emotional one. Linguists tend to come down on one side or the other in this debate and some argue, more subtly, that different elements of a phrase both provide rational and emotional content. Evidence from studies based on extended discourse rather than isolated phrases would tend to weigh in favor of an emotional interpersonal rather than a rational temporal explanation. Historical evidence would also tend to point in this direction. Consider the extensive use of the PP (admittedly somewhat mockingly) in Laurence Sterne’s 18^th century novel Tristram Shandy, with the relative lack of it in late 20^th century cyberpunk sci-fi.
6. Evolutionary grammar and grammaticalization theory. This is in vogue in recent years and does appear to provide a fairly plausible account of how the uses of forms change, by way of analogy and inference, over time. There is however much debate as to the exact origin of forms and the question of whether forms develop in a predictable unidirectional manner. One of the advantages of this theory is that it allows for the coexistence of different uses at any one point in time.

I would draw the following tentative conclusions. The present perfect a) is more emotional than rational; b) has multiple uses; c) depends on the context; d) is often a matter of personal choice; e) is constantly changing; and f) is relatively rare but perhaps increasingly frequent.

It is hard to find examples where the choice of PP or PS is clearly contrary to conventional usage. As McCoard put it, as far back as 1978, “If these cases are, in some sense, ‘regular exceptions’, then we have something to worry about.” With the more powerful empirical tools, such as corpora, now available, this situation has since certainly worsened. This suggests that this is an area of the English language that is still actively open to the effects of language change, which may, to some extent, be arbitrary, but are also determined (possibly ‘in the last instance’) by social and political factors. Evidence also tends to refute a unidirectional thesis—the holy grail of many grammaticalization theorists, whereby the English PP will inevitably end up following the path of its more ancient European neighbors. From a global perspective, things could still go either way.

This brings us full circle, although as hermeneuticians argue, going full circle does not necessarily mean that we have not taken in a lot of ground and produced a lot of interesting knowledge on the way.

The Berlitz-style guide-books and phrase-books of the early 20^th century for the wealthy tourist and the common-sense of governesses trained in schoolbook French inculcated an idea that the English Present Perfect was not that much different from the equivalent form in continental European languages. Present-day grammaticalization theorists, for all the highly sophisticated heuristic linguistic tools at their disposal, but with a penchant for or vested interest in unidirectionality, now offer much the same proposition: English exceptionalism with regard to the Present Perfect will inevitably give way to pressure from a more integrated European union of nations.

There is something quaint about this perspective, which largely ignores the enormous ballast of status and prevalence of use that emanates from the United States and other non-European English-speaking communities. The use of the PP has always been more restricted in the US, although far from non-existent, We can see this as a relic of an earlier stage of English, as much of US English is, dating back to a stage in which England was less involved in the pan-European orbit. But it also stakes out evidence for a case whereby US English is moving in an opposite direction.

In the absence of a more fluid PP/PS distinction, meaning generation tends to be thrown back more onto the use of adverbs and other particles. “Already”, a very interesting adverb, which, until recently, was classified firmly in the open time phrase category and linked to the PP even in US English, is now regularly (if not preferably) used with the PS and increasingly with a present form or the imperative.

While ‘I already did it’ is an entirely acceptable and apparently less fussy alternative to “I have already done it,” “Do it already!” is an innovation and suggests a shift in the range of functions of this adverb to include timely reactions to overwhelmingly present threats or needs, in the context of a digital high-speed world in which the efficacy of response-times is measured in micro-seconds.

“I got it already” is now a very common phrase and its heavy over-determination, in both the Freudian and the Marxist sense, merits the labor of some unpacking. On a purely surface linguistic level “I have got,” has been reduced by way of “I’ve got” to “I got,” bringing this quite ancient but, at the time, novel present perfect idiom back into the orbit of the traditional preterit and dashing down any notion that ‘already’ is a ‘long’ adverb that somehow ‘requires’ or, in McCoard’s touching but somewhat twee terminology, ‘is partial to’ the present perfect form.

Aspect is an old-fashioned word which may refer either to the very specific face you pull or an abstract, verging on meaningless, distinction. Although all modern linguistic studies now claim that listening is as important, if not far more so, than speaking, few take this as their prime focus. It is difficult to do so. It is easier to examine the mouth than plumb the depths of the ear. But, if aspect is to mean anything useful whatsoever—and I believe it does—it must refer to a bodily emotional and/or mental/ideological response on the part of the listener.

A better metaphor in the modern world for the linguistic phenomenon that we call aspect might be ‘gear’. The word ‘gear’ itself has a fascinating etymological trajectory, from battle equipment, to fashion, to the cogs and wheels of the industrial revolution, and has retained all of these senses. In motoring, from which its most common present-day metaphorical meanings derive, it refers to the ability of a motor vehicle to adapt to different speeds and inclinations: its grip on the road.

Gears are made of various interlocking cogged wheels of various sizes that drive each other around to ease our passage over bumpy terrain. I suggest that verb forms perform a similar function in our everyday oral interactions.

In the second half of this chapter I shall attempt to apply the same logic to the distinction between the Present Simple and the Present Continuous.

Bibliography

Binnick, Robert I. (2006) “Aspect and Aspectuality.” In Aarts, B. & MacMahon, A. (Eds.) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Blackwell. Oxford.

Bybee et al. (1994) The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London.

Elsness, Johan (1997) The Perfect and the Preterit in Contemporary and Earlier English. Walter de Gruyter and Co. Berlin.

 

Fuchs, Robert (in press) “The Frequency of the Present Perfect in Varieties of English around the World.” In Werner, Valentin, Suárez-Gómez, Cristina and Seoane, Elena. Re-assessing the Present Perfect in English: Corpus Studies and Beyond. Berlin: de Gruyter

 

Hale, Kenneth L. (2001) A Life in Language. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA and London.

Hopper, Paul J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (2003) Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.

Hübler, Axel (1998) The Expressivity of Grammar. Grammatical devices expressing emotion across time. Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin/New York.

Jespersen, Otto (1949) A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. George Allen & Unwin/Ejnar Munksgaard. London/Copenhagen.

Lewis, Michael (2002) The Lexical Approach. The state of ELT and a way forward. Thomson/Heinle.

McCoard, (1978) The English Perfect Tense. Choice and Pragmatic Inferences. North-Holland Press. Amsterdam.

Michaelis, Laura A. (2006) “Time and Tense.” In Aarts, B. & MacMahon, A. (Eds.) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Blackwell. Oxford.

Murphy, Raymond (1995) English Grammar in Use. A reference and practice book for intermediate students. Cambridge University Press

Scheibman, Joanne (2002) Point of View and Grammar. Structural patterns of subjectivity in American English conversation. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Philadelphia/Amsterdam.

Slobin, Dan I. (1994) Talking Perfectly. Discourse origins of the present perfect John Benjamins Publishing Company. Philadelphia/Amsterdam.

Sterne, Laurence (1996) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Wordsworth Editions Ltd. London.

Swan, Michael (1980) Practical English Usage. Oxford University Press

Thomson, A.J. & Martinet A.V. (1986) A Practical English Grammar. Exercises 1. Oxford University Press.

Thomson, A.J. & Martinet A.V. (1986) A Practical English Grammar. Exercises 2. Oxford University Press.

Webb, Paul (2014) Governor Brewer’s Present Perfect https://oudeis2005.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/governor-brewers-present-perfect/

Ziegeler, Debra (2006) Interfaces with English Aspect. Diachronic and empirical studies. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Philadelphia/Amsterdam.