The Present Perfect and Preterite in English and German

This book deals with the use of the present perfect and the preterite in both English and German. The aim of the investigation is to find out to what extent the use of the present perfect and the preterite varies in English and German and how the original forms are translated into the other language, i.e. whether specific translation patterns can be found. To begin with, a theoretical part summarizes earlier researches by various authors before the main part of the thesis is presented. The research part is a corpus-based analysis, using the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. First of all, original English and German preterite forms and present perfect forms are investigated. Then, it is presented to which extent their translations into German and English differ from the original verb forms.