ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the uses and development of the present perfect, the progressive, modals and semi-modals - categories of the tense/aspect/modality systems of the verb phrase - in Australian English. All of these categories are known to have been undergoing major change for centuries in English and have been the subject of numerous corpus-based studies of contemporary varieties of English. Factors involved in these developments include grammaticalisation, colloquialisation and Americanisation. Most studies of Australian English have found the development of these categories to be less advanced than that in American English, which tends to be in the box seat of grammatical change in English worldwide, but more advanced than that in the postcolonial parent variety, British English. Our survey of the study of tense, aspect and modality in Australian English incorporates new findings derived from “AusBrown”, a recently compiled diachronic corpus of Australian English. The incorporation of AusBrown enables us to extend the scope of analysis to the early 20th century and make comparisons with British and American English of the same time period.
