Paper 006: The Be/have-perfect in 19th-century American English: A Corpus-based Analysis of Some Missionary Documents in Hawaii
MORIYA, Akira (Kyoto University, Japan); IYEIRI, Yoko, (Kyoto University, Japan)
Keywords: historical linguistics, English in Hawaii, perfect auxiliaries, Late Modern English
Abstract
The present study discusses the be- and have-perfect in the ABCFM Hawaii Corpus (the Hawaii Corpus), a corpus of approximately 653,100 words compiled by our research team, using mainly journals written by eight members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who migrated to Hawaii in the 19th century (cf. Iyeiri & Fukunaga, 2020, for some details of the corpus).
Both be- and have-auxiliaries are known to have been used in the perfect construction of mutative intransitive verbs such as come and go since the Old English period (e.g. ‘they are gone’ (be-perfect) and ‘they have gone’ (have-perfect), cf. Denison, 1998). In the Late Modern English period, however, the have-perfect began to replace the be-perfect, and became dominant as in contemporary English (Rydén & Brorström, 1987). This study aims to investigate the uses of perfect forms in the Hawaii Corpus, to compare them with the general trend in 19th-century English and to account for the characteristics of the be/have-perfect usage in different texts included in the Hawaii Corpus. Kytö (1997) suggests that American English (AmE) experienced an earlier increase in the rate of the have-perfect usage compared to British English, and the analysis of the Hawaii Corpus reveals indeed that the be-perfect is already quite rare, except for a few verbs such as improve and change, confirming the general trend in AmE. Other findings in the Hawaii Corpus include: the verb improve, showing a relatively frequent use of the be-perfect, prominently appears in certain contexts regarding health (e.g. her health is very much improved); the be-perfect is less frequent in journals than other text genres; and there are considerable differences in the preference of perfect auxiliaries even between a married couple.
References
Denison, D. (1998). Syntax. In S. Romaine (Ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language: Volume IV 1776-1997 (pp. 92-329). Cambridge University Press.
Iyeiri, Y. & Fukunaga, M. (2020, May 20-23). A Corpus-based analysis of negation in some 19th-century American missionary documents in Honolulu. [Conference Presentation]. ICAME 41, Heidelberg, Germany.
Iyeiri, Y., Fukunaga, M. & Moriya, A. (2019). ABCFM Hawaii Corpus. Ver. 1.2.
Kytö, M. (1997). Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitive from Late Middle to Modern English. In M. Rissanen, M. Kytö & K. Heikkonen (Eds.), English in transition: Corpus-based studies in linguistic variation and genre styles (pp. 17-85). Walter de Gruyter.
Rydén, M. & Brorström, S. (1987). The be/have variation with intransitives in English: With special reference to the Late Modern Period. Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Presentation video
Supplementary Information
None
Q&A live (Zoom) session
No longer available.
This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Thank you for illuminating an aspect of English that is changed dramatically (I’m bringing back the be-perfect;-).
I wonder, was an influential grammar published in the early- to mid-1800s that changed writers’ habits? Webster’s dictionary was published in 1828, for example, and perhaps other prescriptive style guides also moved this shift towards have-perfects.
On a side note, it may be fun for you to analyze the change in style between the 4 generations of Hiram Binghams. Hiram Bingham I arrived in Hawaii in 1820, and his son was also a missionary. Hiram III, known for describing Machu Pichu in the early 1910s, has been called ‘the real Indiana Jones’. And then Hiram IV was a politician, so I’d guess each of them have left behind quite a few texts.
It’s a small sample size, but could make up an interesting afternoon.
Thank you for your comment! Yes, prescriptive grammars are certainly one of the important factors related to the shift from the be-perfect to the have-perfect. Thank you also for noting the research possibility of Hiram Bingham and his family. I will have a look at the archive and see if they have left materials.
Sentences with animate subject tend to describe motion, and thus ‘have’ is more likely to be used, but texts on health focus on the changing of the health conditions. That is why ‘be’ seems more likely to be used. Is there such data for these tendencies in your data?
Thank you so much the comment! As we mentioned in the Q&A session, prescriptive grammarians might have had at least some effect on the choice of the be/have-perfect. As for the influences of the Webster’s dictionary and resulting grammatical conventions in American English, I think the Hawaii Corpus texts are at an intermediate stage in terms of the American English-ness. For example, both the AmE spelling “labor” and the BrE spelling “labour” can be attested in our corpus.
As you have suggested, comparison between multiple generations of speakers might provide us with interesting results for our future study.
Thank you for a very interesting presentation! The letters and journals written by missionaries to Hawaii seem to be great data to look at 18-19 century American English. As you mentioned, the confusion between passive and perfect forms seems to be a driving force to prefer “have” over “be” to express perfective aspect. The example for the word “improve” gave me the impression that the sentence is passive rather than perfective. Was there a context to suggest otherwise?