Perfect-Perfective Variation across Spanish Dialects: A Parallel-Corpus Study

Abstract

To analyze crossdialectal variation between the use of a Present Perfect form (Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto) and a Perfective Past form (Pretérito Indefinido) in Spanish, we make use of two converging methodologies: (i) parallel corpus research, where we compare different translations of the same text (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) into specific standardized written varieties of Spanish (Peninsular, Mexican, Argentinian), and (ii) an elicitation forced-choice task, where native speakers of each of the cities in which these standardized written norms are produced (Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires) have to choose between the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto and the Pretérito Indefinido as the most natural filler for a blank in contexts extracted from the novel. Results from these two tasks do not align completely. While the data from our parallel corpus work indicate a wider distribution of Perfect use in the Mexican translation than in the Peninsular and the Argentinian ones, the elicitation task shows that only the choices of the speakers of Madrid (Castilian Spanish) and Buenos Aires (Rioplatense Spanish) converge with their respective translations patterns. Since the distribution observed in the Mexican translation not only goes against the elicitation data, but also contradicts previous findings in the literature, we abandon it in further analyses. In the second part of the paper, through a detailed annotation of the Peninsular and Argentinian corpora, we show that the constraints allowing Perfect use in each of these standardized varieties respond only to some features previously advanced in the literature. While both dialects allow for experiential and resultative readings of the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto, Castilian Spanish also prefers the use of this marker to locate an event in the hodiernal past. On the other hand, Rioplatense Spanish systematically defaults to the Pretérito Indefinido in these cases, displaying a more restricted distribution for the Perfect form. Both dialects also seem to exhibit a preference for the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto in continuative contexts. Our work thus provides two crucial take-home messages: (i) understanding crossdialectal variation in written language is crucial for advancing crosslinguistic generalizations about tense-aspect phenomena; and (ii) combining parallel corpus and experimental methodologies can help us understand in a more thorough way the distribution of Perfect and (Perfective) Past forms across dialects.

Parallel Corpus Research and Target Language Representativeness: The Contrastive, Typological, and Translation Mining Traditions

“…The number of parallel corpus-based papers in this Special Issue (see Bogaards (2022); Corre (2022); Fuchs and González (2022); Gehrke (2022); Mulder et al (2022); de Swart et al (2022)) bears witness to the increasing role that parallel corpora play in recent crosslinguistic research on tense and aspect. In the early 2000s, however, the same empirical domain led some members of the linguistic community to turn their backs on parallel corpus research, capitalizing on the issue of representativeness (McEnery and Xiao 1999;McEnery et al 2006).…”

Perfect variations in Romance

“…Note that we can use Translation Mining for micro-variation research if the language variety has a written tradition. We refer to Fuchs & Gonzalez (2022) for a comparison of three Spanish translations of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone produced for different European and Latin-American markets. The use of the PERFECT and PERFECTIVE PAST differs significantly in Spanish, both within the Iberian Peninsula and across European and American varieties.…”

Crosslinguistic differences on the Present Perfect Puzzle: An experimental approach

“…Rather, as (5b) exemplifies, the PERFECT is said to be preferred over the Dutch PAST, the Onvoltooid Verleden Tijd (OVT, henceforth), in such contexts ( de Swart 2007, van The dialectal varieties of Peninsular Spanish spoken in Madrid and its surroundings appear to reflect an intermediate point in its availability to combine the Spanish PERFECT marker -the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto-with past-referring temporal adverbials. These dialects allow the PERFECT to express a past event anchored to a specific time in the past, as long as the event has occurred in a time that is included in the day of utterance (Harris 1982, Schwenter 1994, González et al 2019, Fuchs & González 2022 As (6a) indicates, Spanish allows its PERFECT to combine with temporal adverbials (hoy a las tres 'today at three o'clock') that create the relation E,R ⊆ day(S); that is, a relation in which the reference time (R) coincides with the event time (E), and both of these times are properly included within the day of the speech time (S). Moreover, in these cases, Spanish not only seems to allow the use of this marker, but also to prefer it over the Spanish PERFECTIVE PAST, the Pretérito Indefinido, as in (6b).…”