The perfect in spoken British English 1

The English perfect construction involves the perfect auxiliary HAVE followed by a verb in the past participle form. It occurs in several subtypes according to the inflectional form of the auxiliary. The most frequently occurring is the present perfect, as in She has seen them. The other subtypes are the past perfect (She had seen them), the infinitival perfect (She must have seen them), and the -ingparticipial perfect (Having seen them, she went home). All subtypes typically function to express anteriority (i.e. pastness relative to a reference point), although further semantic complexities have led to varying treatments of the perfect, for example as an aspect or a secondary tense system. Research on the English perfect has revealed considerable variation in use both diachronically, across longer historical periods, and synchronically, across regions and dialects. Recent trends in perfect usage are therefore of interest. The study presented here investigates this topic with regard to spoken standard British English. Much previous work has focused mainly or exclusively on the present perfect. However, here we investigate all inflectional subtypes of the perfect in terms of frequency changes over time. The findings on the present perfect are compared with those of other researchers. We then focus in more detail on the past perfect and infinitival perfect, to seek explanations for the frequency changes observed. In the remainder of this introduction we elaborate on the reasons for undertaking this study (1.1) and introduce the corpus used in our research (1.2).