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Chapter 18. The functions of the auxiliary ‘have’ in Australian English vivid narratives

  • Marie-Eve Ritz and Sophie L.R. Richard
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The Perfect Volume
This chapter is in the book The Perfect Volume

Abstract

The present chapter builds on earlier work showing that the Present Perfect (PP) in Australian English (AusE) narratives and police media reports has acquired some of the functions of the Simple Past (SP). It focuses more specifically on subject-auxiliary ellipsis in sequences of non-standard PP clauses with the aim of better understanding auxiliary scope in such segments. Our data are taken from three corpora of oral narratives and one corpus of written media reports. We argue that the auxiliary, in its full or cliticized form, serves as a marker of saliency, highlighting a speaker’s subjectivity, and that it has acquired discourse segmenting functions for some speakers. Both increased subjectivity and widening of scope are consistent with principles of semantic change.

Abstract

The present chapter builds on earlier work showing that the Present Perfect (PP) in Australian English (AusE) narratives and police media reports has acquired some of the functions of the Simple Past (SP). It focuses more specifically on subject-auxiliary ellipsis in sequences of non-standard PP clauses with the aim of better understanding auxiliary scope in such segments. Our data are taken from three corpora of oral narratives and one corpus of written media reports. We argue that the auxiliary, in its full or cliticized form, serves as a marker of saliency, highlighting a speaker’s subjectivity, and that it has acquired discourse segmenting functions for some speakers. Both increased subjectivity and widening of scope are consistent with principles of semantic change.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. The perfect volume 1
  4. Part I. Perfects and their relatives
  5. Chapter 2. “Universal” readings of perfects and iamitives in typological perspective 43
  6. Chapter 3. Perfect and its relatives in Atayal 65
  7. Chapter 4. Structural and functional variations of the perfect in the Lezgic languages 87
  8. Chapter 5. Cross-linguistic parallels and contrasts in a contact language perfect construction 117
  9. Chapter 6. Perfect and negation 137
  10. Chapter 7. The diachrony of the perfect in Zapotec 163
  11. Part II. Perfect extensions, hodiernality and aoristic drift
  12. Chapter 8. More on hodiernality 181
  13. Chapter 9. The impact of the simultaneity vector on the temporal-aspectual development of the perfect tense in Romance languages 213
  14. Chapter 10. Gauging expansion in synchrony 241
  15. Part III. Morphology of perfects
  16. Chapter 11. The rise of the periphrastic perfect tense in the continental West Germanic languages 261
  17. Chapter 12. On the emergence of auxiliary selection in Germanic 291
  18. Chapter 13. Language contact and competition in the periphrastic perfect in Early English 319
  19. Chapter 14. The Swedish perfect and periphrasis 343
  20. Chapter 15. “ Have -less perfects” in Norwegian 365
  21. Chapter 16. From have -omission to supercompounds 397
  22. Chapter 17. Auxiliary reduction in secondary grammaticalization 439
  23. Chapter 18. The functions of the auxiliary ‘have’ in Australian English vivid narratives 461
  24. Index 479
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.18rit

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. The perfect volume 1
  4. Part I. Perfects and their relatives
  5. Chapter 2. “Universal” readings of perfects and iamitives in typological perspective 43
  6. Chapter 3. Perfect and its relatives in Atayal 65
  7. Chapter 4. Structural and functional variations of the perfect in the Lezgic languages 87
  8. Chapter 5. Cross-linguistic parallels and contrasts in a contact language perfect construction 117
  9. Chapter 6. Perfect and negation 137
  10. Chapter 7. The diachrony of the perfect in Zapotec 163
  11. Part II. Perfect extensions, hodiernality and aoristic drift
  12. Chapter 8. More on hodiernality 181
  13. Chapter 9. The impact of the simultaneity vector on the temporal-aspectual development of the perfect tense in Romance languages 213
  14. Chapter 10. Gauging expansion in synchrony 241
  15. Part III. Morphology of perfects
  16. Chapter 11. The rise of the periphrastic perfect tense in the continental West Germanic languages 261
  17. Chapter 12. On the emergence of auxiliary selection in Germanic 291
  18. Chapter 13. Language contact and competition in the periphrastic perfect in Early English 319
  19. Chapter 14. The Swedish perfect and periphrasis 343
  20. Chapter 15. “ Have -less perfects” in Norwegian 365
  21. Chapter 16. From have -omission to supercompounds 397
  22. Chapter 17. Auxiliary reduction in secondary grammaticalization 439
  23. Chapter 18. The functions of the auxiliary ‘have’ in Australian English vivid narratives 461
  24. Index 479
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