TY - JOUR AU - Gonzalez, Paz AU - Verkuyl, Henk PY - 2017/05/30 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - A binary approach to Spanish tense and aspect: on the tense battle about the past JF - Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics JA - Borealis VL - 6 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.7557/1.6.1.4096 UR - https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/borealis/article/view/4096 SP - 97-138 AB - <p>The present paper aims at accounting for the Spanish Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto and the Indefinido by applying three binary tense oppositions: Present vs Past, Synchronous vs Posterior and Imperfect(ive) vs Perfect(ive). For the sixteen Spanish tense forms under analysis a binary approach leads to covering twelve of them. Their relation with the preterital forms outside the range of the three oppositions is accounted for by two surgical operations: (a) the notion of Imperfect(ive) is severed from the notion of ongoing progress by restricting it to underinformation about completion and by seeing continuous tense forms as involving a more complex semantics; (b) the notion of (non-)stative is strictly severed from interference of information coming from the arguments of a verb. These theoretical moves make the way free for a formal-semantic insight into the interaction of Spanish tense and aspect. It also paves the way for a principled distinction between completion and anteriority. Restricted to tense forms pertaining to the past, our analysis sheds light on the struggle for survival of tense forms outside the binary system.</p> ER -