Conservatism or the influence of the semantics of motion situation in the choice of perfect auxiliaries in Jane Austen’s letters and novels

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The present study focuses on the analysis of the choice of either be or have in combination with the past participles of eleven motion verbs («arrive, become, come, enter, fall, go, get, grow, pass, return and run») to form perfective structures in Jane Austen’s letters and novels. She has previously been considered conservative in her grammar, specifically in relation to her preference for «be» as opposed to «have» in this type of structure. A corpus-based study shows that although she could indeed be considered conservative, the option of the auxiliary might also have been motivated by the different components of the motion situation involved in each instance. The conclusions show that some tendencies can be observed in relation to the behaviour of some of these verbs, despite the low number of occurrences of some of the verbs included in the analysis.