{"title":"Present perfect and preterit variation in the Spanish of Lima and Mexico city: findings from a corpus analysis","authors":"Anna Mastrantuono, Brendan Regan","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2022-0060","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In many languages, the present perfect has grammaticalized, gradually displacing the preterit. Within Spanish, this has been documented with the grammaticalization of the present perfect in Peninsular Spanish. To examine this possibility in two Latin American varieties, this study examined present perfect/preterit variation of 36 speakers from Lima and Mexico City from the PRESEEA corpus. While Lima Spanish presented overall more present perfect than Mexico City Spanish, a similar internal constraint hierarchy is predictive of present perfect use in both speech communities. However, Lima Spanish demonstrated a change in progress toward an expansion of the preterit among younger speakers with the indeterminate temporal reference as locus of change. The findings suggest that present perfect grammaticalization may not always be the most common cross-linguistic pathway but rather is subject to source constraints, which may lead to another pathway in which the preterit expands at the expense of the present perfect.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0060","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract In many languages, the present perfect has grammaticalized, gradually displacing the preterit. Within Spanish, this has been documented with the grammaticalization of the present perfect in Peninsular Spanish. To examine this possibility in two Latin American varieties, this study examined present perfect/preterit variation of 36 speakers from Lima and Mexico City from the PRESEEA corpus. While Lima Spanish presented overall more present perfect than Mexico City Spanish, a similar internal constraint hierarchy is predictive of present perfect use in both speech communities. However, Lima Spanish demonstrated a change in progress toward an expansion of the preterit among younger speakers with the indeterminate temporal reference as locus of change. The findings suggest that present perfect grammaticalization may not always be the most common cross-linguistic pathway but rather is subject to source constraints, which may lead to another pathway in which the preterit expands at the expense of the present perfect.
期刊介绍:
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (CLLT) is a peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality original corpus-based research focusing on theoretically relevant issues in all core areas of linguistic research, or other recognized topic areas. It provides a forum for researchers from different theoretical backgrounds and different areas of interest that share a commitment to the systematic and exhaustive analysis of naturally occurring language. Contributions from all theoretical frameworks are welcome but they should be addressed at a general audience and thus be explicit about their assumptions and discovery procedures and provide sufficient theoretical background to be accessible to researchers from different frameworks. Topics Corpus Linguistics Quantitative Linguistics Phonology Morphology Semantics Syntax Pragmatics.