However, in a recent extensive study of
the Hiberno-English perfect (associated with a larger study ofnon-standard
English) John Harris refers to frequent misinterpretations by HibemoEnglish
speakers of such standard English utterances as
How long are you staying here?
This type of structure is often interpreted as being equivalent to standard
English
How long have you been staying here?
Harris goes on to argue convincingly that there is no semantic isomorphism
between any given set of Hiberno-English and standard-English sentences
which exemplify the range of perfect constructions. For example, the three
sentences
(a) Joe has sold the boat
(b) Joe has just sold the boat
( c) Has Joe sold the boat?
exemplify the simple perfect tense-aspect form in Standard English. However,
they are all quite anomalous in even educated Hiberno-English and
would be .. translated" as follows:
(a) Joe has the boat sold
(b) Joe is just after selling the boat
( c) Did Joe sell the boat?
The non-isomorphism is semantic as well as formal. since, for example
Hiberno-English (c) is not only a translation of Standard-English (c) but is
also equivalent to the same standard English string. Thus, Hiberno-English
cannot distinguish between .. Has Joe sold the boat?" and .. Did Joe sell the
boat?,, However, an action completed in the recem past is expressed by a
construction of the (b) type. Cross-dialectal miscommunications are very
commonly reported which seem to be located in the disparity between the
two versions of sentence (b) and these may be seen as symptomatic of a deep
structure disparity between the grammars of the two dialects. The two
dialects cannot be related satisfactorily simply by applying slightly different
transformational rules to derive them from the same deep structure (Harris,
1982). This suggests that dialect grammars may sometimes be more different
than is commonly supposed, and justifies a somewhat closer examination of
how far the communicative competence of a non-standard speaker includes
the capacity to assign the same semantic structure as standard speaker to a
given phonetic string.