Abstract
This thesis offers the first comprehensive sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic investigation of tense/aspect variation in Australian English narratives, focusing on the Narrative Present Perfect (NPP). Multivariate analyses on a corpus of 331 performed narratives show that the NPP is restricted to the speech of non-professional speakers, favoured by males, and not a change in progress. The incursion of the PP into narrative contexts does not constitute a case of grammaticalisation of the PP into a past/perfective: the phenomenon is pragmatic rather than semantic, with the NPP serving as a stylistic/discourse pragmatic device.
Original language | English |
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Qualification | Doctor of Philosophy |
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Award date | 10 Sept 2018 |
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Publication status | Unpublished - 2018 |