engleski

Differences and similarities in the usage of deictic verbs with the Present Perfect and Past Simple in British and American English

The purpose of this paper is to see whether there are any differences between British English (BrE) and American English (AmE) regarding the usage of the present perfect (PrP) and past simple (PS). The research has been conducted on 2400 sentences taken from two different corpora: the British National Corpus (the BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). All sentences included deictic verbs go, lend, take, come, borrow and bring in order to inquire if the directionality of each verb influences the use of either PrP or PS, on the basis of the assumption that deictic categories of Person, Place and Time might coincide because of the subjective viewpoint of the speaker, which plays an important role in all three deictic categories. The results show that when the time is other than present, three deictic categories do not necessarily have to coincide. We hypothesize that these results can be attributed to different dimensional nature of each category, both in the BrE and AmE.

English; deictic verbs; the present perfect; the past simple; viewpoint

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