Abstract

For past-time reference, Present-Day English has a choice between the present perfect (PP) and the simple past tense (SP). The distinction between SP and PP is a fairly recent development in English. Previous corpus-based studies of Present-Day English have consistently shown that the PP is more commonly used in British than in American English. Evidence from the part-of-speech tagged Brown family of corpora is used to test whether the two varieties have been converging in their use of the PP. The data show that the choice between the PP and the SP is still an example of (relatively) stable regional variation rather than ongoing linguistic change.