The Spanish Perfects

Howe, Chad

doi:10.1057/9781137029812_3

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The same meaning shift of the present perfect is attested in northern varieties of Italian (Bertinetto, 1986) and southern/Swiss German (Löbner, 2002;Schaden, 2009). Spanish speakers vary in the distribution of labour between the pretérito perfecto compuesto (ppc) (present perfect) and the pretérito perfecto simple (pps) (perfective past), depending on their geographical location within the peninsula or Latin America (Schwenter and Torres, 2008;Howe, 2013). Because of this variation, Ritz (2012) qualifies the present perfect as a cross-linguistically unstable tense-aspect category.…”

Section: The Perfect In Contrastmentioning

confidence: 85%

Intermediate perfects

Corre,

de Swart,

Xiqués

2023

LiC

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The cross-linguistic variation in distribution and meaning of perfect constructions building on have + past participle in Western European languages has been analysed in terms of the aoristic drift, the shift from resultative via perfect to perfective past meaning that takes us from ‘classical’ perfect languages like English to ‘liberal’ perfect languages like French. This paper challenges the (often implicit) assumption that there is a single path along the aoristic drift, resulting in a linear perfect scale. Data coming from translation corpora reveal that the perfect in three ‘intermediate’ languages (Dutch, Catalan and Breton) is sensitive to lexical aspect (state vs. event), narrativity and hodiernal vs. pre-hodiernal past time reference. These meaning ingredients appear in different combinations in the three languages, thereby establishing them as independent dimensions of variation. The conclusion that there are multiple paths along the aoristic drift has implications for the cross-linguistic semantics of tense and aspect.

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Section: The Perfect In Contrastmentioning

confidence: 85%

Intermediate perfects

Corre,

de Swart,

Xiqués

2023

LiC

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“…The contexts of use in (1a-h) can be implemented in translation questionnaires (Dahl 1985) and other elicitation materials (e.g., the storyboard materials in Rullmann et al 2022) to investigate the variety of morpho-syntactic constructions that cover Perfect meanings across languages. The same meaning-based (onomasiological) approach can fruitfully be applied in micro-variation research to establish the meanings that a given instantiation of the PERFECT allows for in the different diatopic varieties of a language (Howe 2013;Azpiazu 2019;Valente 2021). We relate to this meaning-based approach, but we argue that a formbased (semasiological) approach should take precedence in the study of the HAVE-PERFECT across Romance.…”

Section: From the Semantics Of English To The Have-perfect In Romance...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since the Translation Mining methodology relies on published translations, we cannot use it to do full justice to the extensive variation we find across Romance languages (seeamong others -Valente (2021) on Italian vernaculars and Kempas (2006), Howe (2013) and Azpiazu (2019) on Spanish vernaculars). 1 Instead, we focus on the variation we find across the varieties represented in our corpus and argue that our data provide sufficient breadth and depth to identify the main meaning ingredients that underly the scale in Figure 1.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perfect variations in Romance

et al. 2022

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The morpho-syntactic configuration auxiliary (have or be) + past participle known as the have-perfect functions as a tense-aspect category in many Western European languages. Synchronic variation within Romance nicely illustrates the developmental pattern described as the aoristic drift, whereby the perfect develops over time into a perfective past with full-fledged past meanings. A parallel corpus study of L’Étranger by Albert Camus (1942) and its translations using the Translation Mining methodology provides empirical data supporting the view that modern French, Romanian and Italian make a more liberal use of the perfect, whereas the perfect distribution in Spanish is closer to (but not identical to) English. Catalan occupies an intermediate position and Portuguese has the most restricted perfect among the Romance languages. We argue that this variation is best captured by a perfect scale, without a clear cut-off point between perfect and perfective past meaning. The meaning ingredients that govern the distribution of the have-perfect across Romance languages emerge from the parallel corpus. They include lexical, compositional and discourse semantics, and range from sensitivity to aspectual class, pluractionality, hodiernal and pre-hodiernal past time reference to narration.

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“…Within these zones several different uses have been detected (Azpiazu 2013;Ariolfo 2019). Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos (2008) and Howe (2013) show clear differences in the distribution of the present perfect and the simple past. There are present perfect-favoring dialects (Peninsular Spanish dialects) and simple past-favoring ones (e.g., Mexican and Argentine Spanish) (Howe 2013, pp.…”

Section: The (Un)markedness Of the Present Perfect: Schaden's Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

et al. 2022

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This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across four European languages. The corpus consists of a selection of eight chapters from Javier Marías’s Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo ‘Thus bad begins’, and its translations to English, Dutch, and French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the Spanish source text for tense, and, subsequently, their translations in the other languages, distinguishing between two registers within the novel, i.e., dialogue and narration. We found that the vast majority of the Spanish tenses are translated one-to-one to their counterparts in the three languages, especially in narration. In dialogue, we found several deviations, which we could partially account for within an Optimality Theoretic approach by appealing to the notion of markedness along two different typological dimensions, namely, tense (present versus past) and aspect (imperfective versus perfective).

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The Spanish Perfects

Cited by 3 publications

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Intermediate perfects

Intermediate perfects

Perfect variations in Romance

Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

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