Narrative present in the Spanish of Santiago, Chile

Abstract

Abstract This investigation revises the use of the narrative present in the materials of the PRESEEA corpus. Based on 54 sociolinguistic interviews, the convergence and divergence of this phenomenon’s use is studied in the Spanish varieties from Santiago, Chile, and Mexico City. We attempt to study variation according to the individuals, economic factors and the presence of syntactic-discursive introductors before verbs, following the methodological guidelines of the Guia de estudios del presente narrativo en los corpus PRESEEA (Guerrero and Arriagada, 2017). In this way, we intend to answer two general questions: (a) why are there individuals who use the narrative present more than others and (b) what functions serve such resource within the narratives in sociolinguistic interviews.