Temporality in spoken Esperanto

Abstract

In this article, we present some of the results of an empirical study of temporality in Esperanto spoken by informants of three mother tongues: French, Italian and Russian. By comparing the production of the subjects, this article treats transfer in Esperanto at the conceptual level, not through the forms produced, but rather by considering the preference of the speaker for such and such form used to express a given function. When reading Zamenhof’s writings, we can notice that there is an underlying attribution of aspectual values to participles. Many examples of oral production confirm the evolutionary character of the temporal system of Esperanto.