The English perfect aspect is an area of English grammar which has proven a traditional stumbling block for non-native speakers of English from a variety of mother-tongue backgrounds (Swan and Smith 1987). The present perfect in particular has been characterized as notoriously difficult for EFL learners, on the one hand because of its partial semantic overlap with both the simple present and the simple past, and on the other because of the discrepancies in its representation in grammars and ELT textbooks (Schluter 2002a, 2002b). Although research on the perfect and its problematic delineation abounds, there have been few corpus-based studies on its authentic use in spoken and written English and hardly any on second language use of the perfect (e.g. Granger 1999; Biber et al. 1999; Mindt 2000). The present report investigates second language use of the perfect aspect in argumentative writing produced by advanced Bulgarian and German learners of English and contrasts it with non-professional British and American writers' use. The comparison is based on two learner subcorpora drawn from the Bulgarian and German components of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), and two control corpora drawn from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) (Granger et al. 2002, 2009). The pilot study results confirm previous corpus-based findings in terms of the preference of the present perfect in the British subcorpus; however, they show remarkable differences between the Bulgarian and the German learner subcorpus. Whereas Bulgarian EFL learners have similar frequencies of use of the perfect to those of British novice writers, German EFL learners' frequencies of the perfect resemble American novice writers' frequencies. A further analysis shows that both learner populations fail to employ the perfect in a target-like manner; however, the differences between the German and the Bulgarian learner subcorpus can be attributed to variables like the native language influence and the target language exposure on the one hand, and to the effects of register awareness on the other.
