Craven de Kere wrote:The class of example you use for life experience is still used widely and is unlikely to go away soon. The "isolated examples" you speak of actually make up a significant portion of the use of present perfect, and as I said, its use is in decline.
I have done no independent research into this subject, so I'll assume that you know more about it than I do.
Craven de Kere wrote:Both, and this is very common knowledge among linguists and lexicographers and has been for some time. So much so that grammar rules have evolved to actually sanction use of simple perfect where present perfect used to be the grammatical norm.
No doubt language usage changes over time. But if the perfect tenses have been dying "for some time," it makes one wonder whether we are actually witnessing a slow death or a temporary decline.
Craven de Kere wrote:Heck, it's such common knowledge that I can cherry pick a reference and use Mencken, since you praised him just yesterday.
It's indeed gratifying to know that someone actually reads my posts, but I should point out that I praised Mencken specifically for his
political writing, not his work on language.
Craven de Kere wrote:I'll refer you to his text in
The American Language from 1921 speaking about the "decay" of the perfect tenses.
[i]The misuse of the perfect participle for the preterite, now almost the invariable rule in vulgar American, is common to many other dialects of English, and seems to be a symptom of a general decay of the perfect tenses. That decay has been going on for a long time, and in American, the most vigorous and advanced of all the dialects of the language, it is particularly well marked. Even in the most pretentious written American it shows itself. The English, in their writing, still use the future perfect, albeit somewhat laboriously and self-consciously, but in America it has virtually disappeared: one often reads whole books without encountering a single example of it. Even the present perfect and past perfect seem to be instinctively avoided. The Englishman says "I have dined," but the American says "I am through dinner"; the Englishman says "I had slept," but the American often says "I was done sleeping." Thus the perfect tenses are forsaken for the simple present and the past. [/i]
This actually is a good example of what I was saying above. Clearly Mencken thought that the language was being debased by such vulgarisms as "I am through dinner" instead of the more formal "I have dined." Yet today, it is far more likely that one would hear an American say "I have dined" than "I am through dinner." Although the former is a bit stiff, the latter is unheard of. One is more likely to hear someone say "twenty-three skidoo" or "so's your old man" than to hear someone say "I am through dinner." And the same can be said for "I was done sleeping." Who on earth says that? Indeed, who on earth
said that even during Mencken's time?
Language curmudgeons like William Safire will bemoan the depths into which the language has descended, and complain that people don't talk the way that they should. And Mencken, for all his genius as an acute observer of politics and society, could be just as curmudgeonly when it came to language. Yet their dire predictions for the end of civilized discourse have failed to come true, and so I will reserve judgment on whether the reports of the perfect tenses' death have been accurate or greatly exaggerated.
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