The Spanish Perfects

Pathways of Emergent Meaning

L. Howe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137029805
• eBook ISBN: 9781137029812
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book considers the role of cross-dialectal data in our understanding of linguistic variability, focusing on the widely discussed dichotomy between past tense forms and relying primarily on spoken language data from different varieties of Spanish.

1

Introduction

The ample body of literature concerning the periphrastic past¹ ranges across several linguistic subfields including semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Nonetheless, very little consensus has been reached as to how to explain its distribution in natural language. Following from the early work of Reichenbach (1947), McCoard (1978), and Dowty (1979), researchers have sought to provide a broad characterization that accurately describes all of the nuances of the perfect. Perhaps the best known of these systems of categorization is Comrie’s (1976) taxonomy of the ‘types’ available to the perfect. Comrie’s claim is that these readings are part of the cross-linguistic category of present perfect (or ‘anterior’ following the terminology from Bybee et al. 1994). In recent years various authors have revisited Comrie’s work and offered new insights into how perfect readings are made available in different contexts.

In this monograph I offer an analysis of the present perfect (or pretérito perfecto compuesto) in Spanish, which falls into the set of ‘Have’ perfects of Indo-European described by Giacalone Ramat (2008), and I focus primarily on characterizing its distribution across dialects utilizing a set of semantic features characteristic of perfect forms cross-linguistically. It will be shown that while the standard definition of the perfect as expressing a ‘past event with current relevance’ (Comrie 1976) may be broadly true, it is not always the case that perfect constructions adhere to this description. My analysis brings attention to various dialectal instantiations of the Spanish perfect, noting the relevant distinctions from the commonly accepted archetype.

Central to the discussion of the Spanish perfect in the literature is its variation across dialects. It is well documented that in Peninsular Spanish the perfect exhibits a number of uses that overlap functionally with those of the simple perfective past (or pretérito) (see Schwenter 1994a, Serrano 1994). Across Romance languages, a similar phenomenon is attested in languages where the perfect construction has grammaticalized into a perfective past (Harris 1982, Fleischman 1983). The French passé composé, for instance, which has the same AUX + PAST PARTICIPLE morphosyntactic structure as the Spanish perfect, is used as a perfective past, compatible with adverbials denoting past time like yesterday and last year and used in all sequenced narratives.²

This process of perfect to perfective meaning has not occurred uniformly in those Spanish dialects in which it is attested nor is it the case that the perfect in all dialects expresses uses similar to those of the simple past perfective. The overarching objective of this monograph is to develop a description of the Spanish perfect that takes into account both dialectal variation and trends in semantic change commonly noted among Romance languages.

More specifically, the current monograph aims to:

1. Provide the reader with a general overview of forms of (perfective) past reference in Spanish and their dialect-specific behavior in Spanish;

2. Compare and contrast two varieties of Spanish, using data from Peninsular and Peruvian dialects, in terms of their respective uses of the simple and periphrastic past forms;

3. Demonstrate that assuming parallels between pathways of semantic change instantiated in different dialectal situations can obscure important details regarding the distribution of temporal/aspectual forms; and

4. Offer an account of how periphrastic pasts are subject to variable mechanisms of change that can produce distinct outcomes across dialects.

1.1 Previous analyses

Among the studies concerning the Spanish present perfect (or antepresente) in Spanish, there has been little consensus regarding its exact semantic distribution (Alarcos Llorach 1978 [1947], Bello and Trujillo 1981, Bull 1968, Zamora Vicente 1974, Havu 1986, King 1992, Bosque and Demonte 1999, Carrasco Gutiérrez 2001, among others). What we can say about the Spanish perfect is that it functions, in general dialectal terms, similarly to an ‘archetypal’ perfect as described by Comrie (1976) or Bybee et al. (1994). According to Alonso and Henríquez Ureña (1941), the Spanish present perfect is said to contrast with the pretérito in that the former encodes the notion of present relevance, as shown in (1):³

(1)	a.	Simple past (preterit)
		Juan lavó el coche.
		Juan wash.PASTPERF the car
		‘Juan washed the car.’
	b.	Periphrastic past
		Juan ha lavado el coche.
		Juan has wash.PARTICIPLE the car
		‘Juan has washed the car.’

Like the English perfect, for example, the present perfect in Spanish is said to denote a relationship between a past eventuality (i.e. event or state) and the time of utterance such that this eventuality is interpreted as ‘relevant’ to the current discourse. Thus, with the examples above, a speaker who utters (1b) may implicate that the car is in fact clean at the time of utterance (i.e. the result state interpretation). The preterit in (1a) does not typically give rise to these types of implications, at least not in the conventional way that is generally attributed to the perfect. Stockwell et al. (1965) assert that past, present, and future perfect forms are marked for ‘relevant anteriority’, and indicate an event ‘as anterior to some specified or implied past or non-past point of reference, and explicitly mark[s] it as being of continuing relevance to that point of reference’ (p. 139). This is a commonly held view concerning the Spanish perfect.

1.1.1 Relevance

While there has been no single notion of relevance claimed to be unique to the perfect, there are a number of analyses that maintain that perfects, unlike past perfectives, presuppose or conventionally implicate a relationship between the proposition denoted by the perfect and the current discourse topic (see Inoue 1979, Portner 2003). With respect to the issue of relevance and the perfect, Portner states the following:

Though the use of the past tense (The Earth was struck by giant asteroids in the past) would convey virtually the same information [as The Earth has been struck by giant asteroids in the past], thus yielding a common ground which plausibly also entails an answer to A’s question [Is the Earth in danger of being struck by giant asteroids?], it would not be functionally equivalent to the use of the perfect. The perfect’s presupposition functions to highlight the fact that B’s utterance, in context, serves to imply an answer to A’s question. It doesn’t only provide an answer; it even presupposes that it provides an answer. This point may be closely connected to Inoue’s [1979] idea that the perfect stands in a logical relation to the discourse topic. (2003: 501)

Though I will not provide an extensive discussion of the exact motivations for Portner’s claims, I find his proposal intriguing in that it provides a means of modeling the subjective notion of relevance as applied to the perfect, which heretofore has eluded a precise definition.⁴ Important to this proposal is the claim that relevance is conventionally associated with the ongoing discourse structure (cf. Roberts 1996). For the purposes of the current discussion, I adopt this discourse topic-based notion of relevance.

1.1.2 Functional overlap

The issue of functional overlap between the perfect and the preterit is an interesting one for Romance languages since it is not uncommon for the periphrastic past forms to develop perfective uses (see Harris 1982, Fleischman 1983, Squartini and Bertinetto 2000). Perhaps the most well-known example of the development of perfective meaning from a source that originally functioned as a prototypical perfect is the French passé composé, which, like the Spanish perfect, is formed from an auxiliary and a past participle but does not carry the same contextual implications. Observe example (2):

(2) Jean a lavé la voiture.
Jean have wash.PARTICIPLE the car
‘Jean washed the car.’

In accordance with the argument that the periphrastic past is linked by convention to the moment of speech and that simple pasts are not, example (2) can be felicitously uttered in a context, by virtue of its perfectivity, in which there is no particular relationship between the event of Jean’s having washed the car and the current discourse topic. Of course, following the Gricean Cooperative Principle, speakers are obliged to make their contributions relevant to the topic under discussion, so it stands to reason that the passé composé would be subject more generally to this requirement because of conversational expectations. As it turns out, it is quite difficult to test for conventional relevance implications.

If our criterion for differentiating between a present perfect and a perfective past is presupposition of discourse relevance, then it becomes difficult for us to determine how an example like (2) is functionally distinct from an anarchetypal perfect like (1) since, as mentioned above, both are subject to the more general requirement of relevance in the Gricean sense. Fortunately, there are a number of formal characteristics that relate to either perfects or perfectives. For instance, certain types of adverbials, namely those denoting definite past reference like yesterday, are usually incompatible with a (present) perfect but acceptable with a perfective. Note that ayer ‘yesterday’ cannot co-occur with the perfects in either Spanish or English; this is not the case in French.

(3)	a.	Spanish
		??Juan ha lavado el coche ayer.
	b.	French
		Jean a lavé la voiture hier.
	c.	English
		??John has washed his car yesterday.

Cross-linguistically, perfects of the form AUX + PAST PARTICIPLE, particularly those with a ‘have’ auxiliary, vary widely in terms of their patterns of co-occurrence with different adverbials (as shown in example 3) in addition to a number of other formal features. In Spanish, for example, the perfect can be used to refer to an eventuality that begins in the past and continues into the present (i.e. the so-called ‘Continuative’ use). While this use is also possible in English, it is disallowed by the French passé composé:

(4)	a.	Spanish
		Juan ha estado enfermo desde el martes.
	b.	French
		??Jean a été malade depuis mardi.
	c.	English
		John has been sick since Tuesday.

These two features, adverbial co-occurrence and Continuative interpretations, are sensitive to patterns of perfectivity and thus serve as a useful means of ascertaining the distribution of a perfect in a given language. Periphrastic past constructions in many languages, such as French (and German and Standard Italian), are used primarily with features of a perfective, which in many cases do not overlap with the functions typically ascribed to perfects. One of the objectives in this monograph is to develop a typology of these features based primarily on their relationship to perfects and perfectives and to apply them to the description of the present perfect in Spanish.

Additionally complicating this issue is that cross-dialectally the Spanish perfect displays variable functional overlap with the simple past – for example, compatibility with definite past adverbials (e.g. ayer ‘yesterday’, a las nueve ‘at 9 o’clock’) and use in sequenced narratives. Among the set of dialects that possesses these purportedly innovative uses of the present perfect, the varieties that have receive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Perfect Features
• 3 The Spanish Perfects
• 4 The Perfect in Peruvian Spanish
• 5 Perfective Perfects in Two Dialects of Spanish
• 6 Conclusions
• Appendix A: Sentence Judgment Task
• Appendix B: Interview Protocol
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index