Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

8-17-1972

Abstract

A search of the relevant literature and of textbooks of English for speakers of other languages fails to turn up a theory of the English perfect which is both comprehensive and fully explanatory. The author hypothesizes that the meaning common to all forms of the perfect of American English, which includes those forms traditionally called the present perfect tense, the past perfect tense, and the perfect of the infinitive, the gerund, and the present participle is priority to a point of reference. The perfect situates the action or state conveyed by the lexical verb in a period of time which begins before and extends to the point of reference. The perfect in American English is thus hypothesized to be period tense rather than aspect. The author further hypothesizes that the finite perfects typically have a fixed point of reference; that of the past perfect is in the past, that of the present perfect is in the non-past. The point of reference which characterizes the non-finites is variable-­past or non-past--depending on features which can usually be diagnosed from linguistic context. In contexts that are timeless, the perfect itself is timeless and exhibits only pure priority. The author finally hypothesizes that each instance of the perfect in actual use conveys one of three secondary meanings, or overtones, single action, iterative, or continuative. The overtone depends partly on the nature of the lexical verb, partly on other features usually diagnosable from context. The verification of the hypothesis is accomplished by use of the Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, compiled and computerized at the Department of Linguistics of Brown University. The instances of the perfect from approximately 300,000 words, or 30% of the Corpus, are extracted, analyzed for meaning, and the distribution of the various forms in written American English is determined. Various particular studies, for example, number and composition of conditional sentences containing a perfect in either component, the present perfect as recent past, etc., are conducted. The study's hypothesis is demonstrated to account satisfactorily for most instances of the perfect; the counterexamples, both systematic and unsystematic, are relatively few. It is thus concluded that the hypothesis is not disproved. The perfect tenses are about equally distributed in the Corpus. Imaginative prose, however, is characterized by a greater average number of past perfects; informative prose by a greater average number of present perfects. The non-finites of the perfect are rare, and some of the forms which are systematically possible, for example, ought to + perfect of lexical verb, are not found in the portion of the Corpus under examination. A teaching model for students of English as a second language in the United States (both secondary and adult levels) is constructed in light of the study's findings, and suggestions for the application of the findings to the teaching of English to speakers of English and to the teaching of English outside the United States are offered.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Secondary Education

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Robert Harold White

Second Committee Member

George Hirshfield

Third Committee Member

Stanley Stewart Newman

Fourth Committee Member

Dean Guy Brodkey

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