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Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium edited by Nuria Sagarra and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio ISBN 1-57473-413-X library binding vi + 341 pages publication date: 2006 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract José Esteban Hernández Present Perfect for Preterit in Salvadoran Narratives: The Perfective Expansion into Narrative Discourse 297-307 (complete pdf) In this paper, data from a corpus of Salvadoran Spanish is used to analyze the variation of Present Perfect and Preterit in narrative discourse. The Present Perfect form, which usually has a perfect meaning in Spanish, is encroaching on the semantic spaces of Preterit, which has a perfective meaning. The present analysis showed that the elements that comprise the narrative can help explain the way in which PP is expanding into narrative contexts in this variety. Present Perfect seems to enter the narrative elements that surround the complicating action first, and from here it begins its expansion to the complicating action itself. Non-complicating elements are usually evaluative in nature and are not affected by the strong past temporal constraints that seem to rule the complicating action. |