Revisiting Perfect/Preterit instability across Romance. On functional motivations for diverging paths

Abstract

A hallmark of the Perfect/Preterit opposition is its instability; perfects tend to become something else, such as general pasts. In this article, I employ a sample of 40 Romance varieties to discuss this instability in the light of usage-based grammaticalization theory. The data-set illustrates that either Perfect or Preterit expansion is the likely outcome of a system in which both exist. Ultimately, I discuss these findings in the light of suggested motivations for morphosyntactic change, specifically the role processing plays in these. I briefly discuss the result of the change in the light of the distinction between source- and target-oriented explanations. The analysis uncovers a need for a more nuanced understanding of the assumed direction in the development of Perfects.

Keywords:

• Grammaticalization
• perfect
• preterit
• Latin American Spanish
• Romance

Notes

¹ After Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994, 105).

² In the remainder of this article, capital letter (as in Perfect or Preterit) refers to the language-specific category.

³ Note that descriptions of the Latin American norm usually assume that perfects are used to convey imperfect meaning (see, e.g., Squartini and Bertinetto 2000, 413). The data from Fløgstad (2016, see especially Chapter 6) show that this question is more varied, and also show that many Latin American varieties prefer the Preterit, not the Perfect.

⁴ Perfects and preterits are known to exhibit functional overlap, especially in contexts expressing experientiality (see, e.g., Fløgstad 2016) It is therefore likely that speakers that have these categories in their language frequently face actual optionality of form.