Is there variation in the usage of the Imperfect and Perfect tenses in Spanish or other Romance languages?

Question

I'm looking into both diachronic (historical) and synchronic (sociolectal, dialectal) variation, especially where the two tenses overlap. I know the basics of how they are each used, but I was wondering how that usage might vary from person to person.

Answer 1

I'm not a linguist, so I can't give you the detail that you require, but I can tell you that Peninsular Spanish speakers use the present perfect in more cases than do Latin American speakers. In Spain, the present perfect is currently almost interchangeable with the preterit–at least, among the speakers I am familiar with (from Madrid and Valencia in the vast majority). That doesn't really answer your question, but it does suggest to me that the two tenses don't overlap as much in Peninsular Spanish as they might in Latin American Spanish. (Then again, I'm not a linguist…).

Butt and Benjamin is a decent grammar; I'd second the recommendation. Lapesa's history (and other works) might give you the details you need on the evolution of the present perfect and its current usage (his 1996 study El español moderno y contemporáneo).

The Real Academia Español has two databases on its Web portal which will be useful to you, I'd imagine: CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual), for examples of contemporary usage; and CORDE (CORpus Diacrónico del Español), which should provide you examples of historical usage. CORDE and CREA can both be accessed via

http://www.rae.es

Once there, click on "Consulta Banco de datos." For CREA, click on Corpus Actual; for CORDE, click on Corpus Histórico.

Now, in order to get what you want from these databases, you'll have to be a little creative in fashioning queries, but you might be able to get some useful historical/contemporary examples.

-Fuz

Answer 2

I'm afraid that this question might be too field-specific to ask here. I'm a linguist, but I'm not sure I can answer this question. If I understand correctly, you are interested in how different dialects of the same Romance language use the tenses differently. Is that right?

If you are able to use words like "synchronic" it seems like you know a little about linguistics. If you know about linguistics, you probably have access to some materials like article databases, or at least Google Scholar. Try searching on terms like "dialects of Spanish", "Spanish tense", and so forth.

Oh, I just remembered that I have a book that might help you. It's called "A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish" by Butt and Benjamin. This book is a pretty comprehensive descriptive grammar of Spanish, and it includes examples from different dialects and registers. Maybe you could find your answer in that book. (Just so you know, it doesn't cover historical linguistics, but you should be able to get some information.)

Have you tried asking LINGUISTList? (If you don't know what that is, ask one of your professors, or you can search for it online. But do your own homework first, if you can.)