The Perfect Volume

The present chapter builds on earlier work showing that the Present Perfect (PP) in Australian English (AusE) narratives and police media reports has acquired some of the functions of the Simple Past (SP). It focuses more specifically on subject-auxiliary ellipsis in sequences of non-standard PP clauses with the aim of better understanding auxiliary scope in such segments. Our data are taken from three corpora of oral narratives and one corpus of written media reports. We argue that the auxiliar