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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.