The Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect in Discourse

What is it about?

What kind of contextual cues and strategies do speakers (un)consciously follow when choosing the Present Perfect? This book presents an in-depth study of how speakers make use of the Present Perfect in (Peninsular) Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese. It focusses on the level of discourse demonstrating how tense form choice is not determined by truth conditions alone but also by factors that lay beyond the level of isolated propositions, including the event structure, the perspectival structure and the argumentative structure. While it is widely established that the semantics of the Spanish and the Portuguese PP differ in a significant way (which has even led to a discussion of whether the Portuguese PP should be considered a Present Perfect at all), the results surprisingly reveal discursive strategies to be found in both Spanish and Portuguese.

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Photo by Mikołaj on Unsplash

Photo by Mikołaj on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The study brings together concepts of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and a traditional topic of Romance linguistics, creating benefits for both disciplines. In this vein, the approach offers researchers familiar with the topic new perspectives. Thinking of practical applications, the results may offer new insights for language acquisition research that might be converted into normative rules.