Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

Mulder, Gijs; Schoenmakers, Gert-Jan; Hoenselaar, Olaf; Hoop, H. de

doi:10.3390/languages7030217

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 46 publications

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“…In contrast, IMP yields simultaneity with another event: in (2) the crying event was ongoing when the picking-up event happened, and therefore, they happened at the same time. Examples are taken from Vet (2000), cited in (Leonetti 2004); for more illustration of the event ordering effects of PI and IMP in Spanish, see Mulder et al (2022).…”

Section: The Spanish Contrast Pretérito Indefinido and Imperfectomentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpretation of Imperfective Past Tense in Spanish: How Do Child and Adult Language Varieties Differ?

García-del-Real

Hout

2022

Languages

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Some studies on the L1 acquisition of aspect in various child languages have discovered that imperfective aspect is acquired later than perfective aspect, whereas others find early adult-like performance. A variety of explanations has been advanced, particularly problems (i) with the semantics of imperfective aspect in combination with telic predicates, (ii) inferring the intended temporal antecedent in a discourse, and (iii) reasoning about an agent’s intentions to complete the event when observing a situation of an event in progress. The current study aimed to disentangle which of the purported explanations can best explain the acquisition patterns. Twenty-three Spanish monolingual children (mean age 5;11) and 17 adults were presented with telic sentences with one of two aspectual tenses in Spanish (pretérito indefinido and pretérito imperfecto). Using a picture-selection task and presenting the sentences either in a narrative setting or in a non-narrative setting, participants were prompted to choose between complete, ongoing, and incomplete situations. In the non-narrative setting children’s interpretation of imperfecto was adult-like, but in the narrative setting it was not. The target-like interpretation in the non-narrative setting reveals that the semantics of imperfecto in telic-imperfective sentences has been acquired (contra explanation i). Furthermore, Spanish five-year-olds did not depend on cues for agent intentionality when interpreting the imperfecto (contra explanation iii). The discrepancy between narrative and non-narrative setting suggests the challenge lies in discourse integration (supporting explanation ii).

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Section: The Spanish Contrast Pretérito Indefinido and Imperfectomentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpretation of Imperfective Past Tense in Spanish: How Do Child and Adult Language Varieties Differ?

García-del-Real

Hout

2022

Languages

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Past tense reference to future eventualities

Haans,

de Hoop

2023

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The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: Pa die ging morgen golfen ‘Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.’ Here, the past tense verb ging ‘went’ can be called a ‘fake past’, since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb tomorrow. We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely eventuality. We present a Reichenbachian (1947) analysis of this use of past tense, in which we argue that while the eventuality takes place in the future, past tense is used to indicate that the point of perspective (R) is situated in the past (i.e. R-S-E).

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On the acceptability of the not so dummy auxiliary ‘do’ in Dutch

Sert,

Hubers,

Redl

et al. 2023

AVT

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The auxiliary doen ‘do’ in standard Dutch is usually described as ‘dummy’ because it supposedly adds nothing substantial to the meaning of the sentence. We argue, however, that the auxiliary does have a function in the sentence, as a marker of either habitual or intentional aspect. In an online production experiment, we investigated the acceptability of the allegedly dummy auxiliary doen ‘do’. Results show that the degree of acceptability of the auxiliary doen ‘do’ is very low, even lower than the widely disapproved use of hun ‘them’ as a subject in Dutch. However, because a significant difference was found in the acceptability between the habitual and the intentional reading, we conclude that the auxiliary doen ‘do’ in Dutch cannot be dummy, i.e. semantically empty.

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Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

Cited by 7 publications

References 46 publications

Interpretation of Imperfective Past Tense in Spanish: How Do Child and Adult Language Varieties Differ?

Interpretation of Imperfective Past Tense in Spanish: How Do Child and Adult Language Varieties Differ?

Past tense reference to future eventualities

On the acceptability of the not so dummy auxiliary ‘do’ in Dutch

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