"Two Romance Tenses and the Atlantic in Between": a Study of Preterit and Present Perfect in Present-day Spanish

PAST TENSES ACROSS THE ATLANTIC Following previous studies of the syntactic variation on tense, this work reviews the historical development and present-day usage of two past tenses in Latin-American and European Spanish. It covers those aspects which connect the usage of the preterit and the present perfect with the speakers using them, in a mainly socio-pragmatic perspective. Specifically, it investigates the aspectual distinction, frequency of use of these tenses by speakers on both sides of the Atlantic, and the extent to which the present perfect is replaced by the preterit in Latin-American Spanish. The study includes the contrastive description of aspectual values as utilized in European Romances, as opposed to the transplanted dialects of Latin-America. The value of ?recent past?, so dominant in the present perfect of Peninsular Spanish and other European Romances, is fulfilled by the simple preterit in Latin-American Spanish, though the varying frequencies found in the language samples from different regions and register types also indicate that the aspectual value of the preterit is not entirely uniform in the New World.