The present perfect in Irish English

This article begins with an introduction to language corpora and the approach to linguistic description arising from corpus linguistic approaches to the description of varieties. It stresses the importance of a well-balanced, representative corpus for general language description and demonstrates the benefits of a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach. It introduces the International Corpus of English: Ireland Component (ICE-Ireland) and presents a case study of the present perfect, with particular reference to the HAVE + -ed participle construction, the after perfect, the medial-object perfect, the BE perfect, the extended-now perfect, and the use of present and past tense with perfective meanings. Throughout the case study, the article underlines the importance of quantitative patterns in the data uncovered by a corpus linguistics approach.