The microvariation of the Spanish perfect in three varieties (original) (raw)
Related papers
Languages, 2019
This article focuses on the use of the present perfect (he cantado) with aoristic value, or rather, on pre-hodiernal contexts in which, as a rule, the simple form (canté) should appear. This verbal form is examined on the basis of a corpus of semi-guided interviews provided to Latin American students living in Genoa and taking into account its characteristics, the syntactic environment in which it is used, combinations with other verb forms, adverbial complements, temporal expressions, deixis and the communicative context in which it is inserted. This phenomenon has already been analyzed in several recent studies carried out by Azpiazu, Kempas, Montoro del Arco, Bermejo Calleja and Soto, both in European and American contexts, and has led to the conclusion that it could be related to discursive strategies of the speaker as well as to a convergence towards the local language (i.e., Italian).
The modal perfect: haya cantado and habré cantado in some varieties of modern Spanish
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 2022
The numerous studies on the perfect compound form in Spanish lack a detailed analysis of the subjunctive and future forms (haya cantado and habré cantado), which under certain syntactic and pragmatic conditions are parallel to the indicative one, he cantado. Based on our knowledge of the Spanish indicative present perfect and its use in different Spanish-speaking areas, this paper deals with the distribution and functions of these two "modalised perfects" and their relationship with the corresponding simple forms (cantara and cantaría). The aim is to determine the extent to which these two pairs of forms are functionally and diatopically similar (or not) to the pair he cantadocanté. Our findings help us to better understand the functions of all simple and compound perfect forms in Spanish and their development in eight Spanish-speaking cities in Spain and the Americas.
2008
Tense relates an event to a specific point in time, usually the moment of speech, and includes categories such as past, present, and future (Comrie 1985). Aspect, on the other hand, involves "different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation" (Comrie 1976:3) and includes oppositions such as perfective versus imperfective and progressive versus non-progressive. The perfective/imperfective distinction has been characterized in various ways, including viewing a situation as a unified whole (perfective) versus taking into account its internal structure (imperfective) (Comrie 1976), representing the time interval over which the situation occurs as closed or bounded (perfective) versus open or unbounded (imperfective) (González 1998, Montrul & Slabakova 2002), or highlighting the situation's termination (perfective) versus its duration (imperfective) (King & Suñer 2008). Comrie (1976) views progressive aspect as a subcategory of imperfective aspect. He first makes the distinction within imperfectivity between habitual and continuous aspect, and then further subdivides continuousness into progressive and non-progressive manifestations, with the latter corresponding to stative verbs (Comrie 1976:25). Thus, within imperfectivity, non-progressive aspect can refer to either continuous states or habitual actions. As is the case with many languages, Spanish verbal morphology marks both temporal and aspectual distinctions. Of interest to the present paper is how Spanish combines the aspectual distinctions discussed above with past temporal reference, and how this compares with corresponding forms in English. First of all, Spanish has two simple past tenses, the preterite and the imperfect, which encode perfective and imperfective aspect, respectively. In contrast, English has only one simple past tense. An example of the Spanish verb leer 'to read' in the preterite is given in (1) below, while (2) illustrates the sam English verb. (1) Marisol leyó el libro Cien años de soledad. (2) Marisol leía el libro Cien años de soledad. (3) Marisol read the book One Hundred Years of Solitude. The English simple past in (3) is analogous to the Spanish preterite in (1) above, with its default aspectual interpretation being perfective, while the Spanish imperfect in (2) lacks a corresponding * The author would like to thank J. Clancy Clements, César-Félix-Brasdefer, Kimberly Geeslin, Jason Killam, and two anonymous reviewers for the HLS 2006 Proceedings for their assistance with various aspects of this research project including the design and carrying out of the study and helpful comments on earlier drafts. All errors remain my own.
Telicity and the Developmental Acquisition of the English Present Perfect by L1 Spanish Speakers
2014
The Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994; 1996) proposes that the inherent lexical aspect of verbs plays a major role in the acquisition of tense-aspect (TA) morphology in both first and second language. This has been attested in most studies on TA morphology conducted with past and present TA markers. The present study examined the acquisition of Present Perfect, a rather insufficiently studied TA form from a Prototype Account, in two of its four functions, Experiential Past and Persistent Situation. The subjects were 85 L1-Spanish English language learners at intermediate and advanced levels. All participants had received formal instruction in English grammar as part of their curriculum. The data was collected through a forced-choice task with 16 situations equally distributed between the two Present Perfect functions and between telic and atelic verbs of four semantic categories: stative, activities, achievements, and accomplishments. Participants had to choose the correct verb form out of three options (Present, Past or Present Perfect) that would best complete the sentences given. The results showed evidence of clear developmental stages in the acquisition of the Present Perfect. The stages were characterized by an important role of proficiency level and lexical aspect as the more proficient participants showed a more accurate use of the target form. In addition, both the intermediate and advanced groups showed a tendency towards employing Persistent Situation with atelic verb types, whereas they used Experiential Past with telic verbs. I would also like to thank the data collector, my friend and colleague from my Argentinian University, Carolina De Piero. Without her predisposition to comply with the requirements from the Human Subjects Committee, I would not have been able to gather the data for this study. I will always appreciate her disinterested and genuine assistance. With her, I would like to thank the participants for providing the data. Finally, I would like to thank my mentors Guadalupe Zamora and Sara Lopez for inspiring me in the learning of English Grammar and pushing me to reach the highest standards. v
Grammaticalization in the Evidential pathway of the Andean Spanish Present Perfect
Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics
This work examines the development of the Spanish Present Perfect (PP) in an excolonial region where Spanish is in contact with Amerindian languages and argues for the inclusion of linguistic factors connected to ‘subjectivity’ and ‘information structure’ in the study of the PP, alongside the traditional temporal and aspectual factors. Perfects in the world’s languages derive from three main sources (BE/HAVE, COME, FINISH, Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994), but HAVE perfects (e.g., Spanish) are considered the least common pattern (WALS, Dahl & Velupillai 2013; Drinka 2017). Bybee et al. (1994) posit that only the stative source branches into two distinct grammaticalization pathways of the PP: the temporal (towards past/perfective) or the evidential (leading to (in)direct evidential). There are exceptions to the temporal pathway in Romance: Daca-Romanian (Drinka 2017), Judeo-Spanish (Varol 2006), and Andean Spanish varieties (Escobar & Crespo del Río 2021) are argued to follow the evid...