The changing verb phrase in present-day British English

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This research aims to investigate in which ways English verbal constructions have changed in the recent past in spoken present-day English. An example of a recent change in English is the increased use of the so-called progressive construction (e.g. 'I am singing'), exemplified in the McDonalds slogan 'I'm loving it', where in the past one might have simply said 'I love it!'. Another example is the use of a definite time reference with the so-called perfect construction in English (e.g. 'I have read it.'). Thus, whereas in the past a sentence like 'I have seen him last week' was unacceptable - and still is to many speakers - constructions like this have been attested with some frequency recently. The project aims to study the nature, extent and reasons for such changes in English. Use will be made of a recently developed collection of spoken material (a 'corpus') which contains spontaneous spoken English from the 1960s and from the 1990s. The choice of spoken language as a source of data is important, given that it is generally agreed among linguists that changes in languages originate in that medium.