On Oct 5, 2012, at 6:30 AM, Damien Hall wrote:
> Arnold Zwicky reminds me that as far as he can recall, Jim McCawley, always a sure touch for the catchy, funny and memorable in our discipline (see ‘English Sentences without Overt Grammatical Subjects’), called the kind of perfect tense we’ve been discussing the ‘hot news perfect’. That was the sort of thing I was groping for. Thanks, Arnold!
>
> [Addition:] Does the fact that Jim McCawley gave this a label imply that it can also be found in some American Englishes? I only say this because Jim was American. Of course, he could easily have been discussing and naming a phenomenon from another dialect than his own – I was just struck by the fact that it was an American who gave a name to a phenomenon which is (as far as this discussion has brought up so far) British.
(4) Hot News Perfect, to report hot news (often with 'just', 'recently', etc.), Malcolm X has (just) been assassinated.
McCawley, James D. 1971. Tense and time reference in English. In C. Fillmore and T. Langendoen (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Semantics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 96-113. [with four types of perfects]
....
this sort of perfect as recent past is certainly alive in AmE. but it might be that the contexts in which it's used differ in AmE and BrE.
arnold
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