Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads (original) (raw)
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A binary approach to Spanish tense and aspect: on the tense battle about the past
Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2017
The present paper aims at accounting for the Spanish Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto and the Indefinido by applying three binary tense oppositions: Present vs Past, Synchronous vs Posterior and Imperfect(ive) vs Perfect(ive). For the sixteen Spanish tense forms under analysis a binary approach leads to covering twelve of them. Their relation with the preterital forms outside the range of the three oppositions is accounted for by two surgical operations: (a) the notion of Imperfect(ive) is severed from the notion of ongoing progress by restricting it to underinformation about completion and by seeing continuous tense forms as involving a more complex semantics; (b) the notion of (non-)stative is strictly severed from interference of information coming from the arguments of a verb. These theoretical moves make the way free for a formal-semantic insight into the interaction of Spanish tense and aspect. It also paves the way for a principled distinction between completion and ant...
The Role of the Present and Past Subjunctive in Argentinean Spanish
The modern Spanish subjunctive system comprises four morphologically distinct forms. Two present tenses (present and present perfect) and two past tenses (past and past perfect). In most subordinate clauses, the distribution of the different subjunctive forms is governed by sequence of tense (SOT). This formal mechanism requires that the tense specifications of the matrix and the subordinate clauses match. More specifically, a past tense matrix predicate cannot embed a present subjunctive form unless the subordinate clause refers to an unfulfilled or future event. In the Spanish spoken in Argentina SOT is often violated, with the present subjunctive being the chosen form to occur in all types of embedded clauses, regardless of the tense in the matrix clause. In the first half of the paper, I study this phenomenon across all subordinate clauses. In particular, I look at complement, relative and adjunct clauses to investigate how advanced is the replacement of the past subjunctive with the present subjunctive. The data show that the present subjunctive is in fact free to occur in all types of subordinate clauses, whenever the past morphology of the past subjunctive is merely a formal reflex of SOT. In other words, when the morphology is not semantically meaningful or contentful, the past subjunctive is replaced by the present subjunctive. In the second half of the paper, I set about answering three important questions raised by the current state of the language: (I) why is the subjunctive paradigm so unstable compared to the stable indicative system?, (ii) what makes the present subjunctive the best choice to replace the past subjunctive? and (iii) is this development cross-linguistically attested?
The Syntactic Expression of Tense (2007, Lingua 117.2)
Abstract In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (ET) argument containing the verb phrase.
Evidential subtypes and tense systems in Brazilian Native Languages
DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2017
The aim of this paper is to illustrate the possibility of interaction between Functional Discourse Grammar and typological studies by examining the relationship between evidentiality and tense in a sample of native languages of Brazil. More specifically, it shows that the nature of the mental process involved in the construction of evidential meaning determines its combination with different dimensions of past, present and future.
Revisiting the Semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect
This study reexamines the semantics of the Portuguese Present Perfect and proposes an analysis of this periphrastic past that does not appeal to type-shifting coercion mechanisms. Aspectual coercion was claimed to explain purported mismatches between selection restrictions of the Portuguese Present tense and the aspectual properties of the Perfect (Schmitt 2001). The present study proposes a truth-conditional compositional analysis of sentences with the Portuguese Present Perfect in which the lexical meaning of the auxiliary ter 'have' combined with the meaning of the Present Indicative tense (ter+PresInd) contribute a universal quantifier whose domain is the topic time interval.
J.W. Schwieter (ed.), Innovative research and practices in second language acquisition and bilingualism. Language Learning & Language Teaching Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 2013
This cross-sectional study examines the production of tense and aspect morphology in child and adult heritage Spanish, with the view of informing the development of pedagogical interventions in Spanish language for child and adult heritage Spanish speakers. We compare natural production data from Spanish/English bilingual speakers with monolingual children and adults matched by age. Results show a preference for the production of the preterite as opposed to the imperfect among the older bilingual children, compared to younger children and adults, suggesting L1 attrition in the life span. We argue that the overproduction of preterite tense might be due to semantic transfer from English and morphosemantic restructuring of the aspectual system. The imperfect tense remains underdeveloped across all age groups in the bilingual population, and competes with present tense in adulthood, suggesting incomplete development. Based on these results, we discuss important pedagogical implications for the teaching of aspectual distinctions in heritage Spanish. Finally, we conclude that both L1 attrition and incomplete acquisition play a fundamental role in heritage language development, depending on the type of linguistic knowledge, which has an impact on the Spanish language teaching practices to be adopted for child and adult heritage speakers.