El progresivo en el español peninsular dialectal

Abstract

The periphrasis estar (‘to be’) plus gerund in Spanish as a progressive strategy has drawn much attention. All the studies that have dealt 1 Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: Víctor Lara Bermejo (victorl@flog.uned.es / viktoresc@hotmail.com), c/ Senda del Rey, 7, 28040 Madrid (España). 330 BOLETÍN DE FILOLOGÍA TOMO LV, NÚMERO 1, 2020 with it point out that it can refer to different readings: focal, durative, iterative and even habitual. However, the American variety would be in an ulterior phase, as it would imitate to some extent the English language by also having specialised the progressive to express future. In this article, I aim to account for the current validity of the progressive in dialect Peninsular Spanish and verify whether its usage is geographically restrained, what syntactic factors condition it, what semantic aspects affect its construction and to what extent it has achieved the stage attested in the American variety.