INHERENT ASPECT: A SOCIOFUNCTIONALIST APPROACH OF PAST IMPERFECTIVE VERBAL FORMS IN SPANISH

Abstract

We deal with the category aspect in a lexical dimension – an inherent aspect - and its interaction with the grammatical aspect, in order to inquire the convergences and divergences in the compositional shaping of the aspect. Our data come from twenty four short stories written in Spanish language, selected based on the cultural region parameter: Caribe; Mexico and Central America; Andes, Rio of the Prata; Chile and Spain. It was obtained a total of 2.093 data: 290 of them are imperfective periphrasis of past, that is, 13,85% of the total. These forms encode variably the descriptive, narrative, habitual and desiderative functions. The other identified functions – interactive, politeness, present, future, simultaneity, contrariety and playful – were only encoded by the imperfective past tense. The analysis of the correlation between the inherent aspect and the grammatical one corroborates the range of imperfectiviness by Givón (2001), which issupported by criteria of Vendler’s typology (2005 [1967]): states, the ones less marked and predicable, present more occurrences; followed at scale by activities, culminated processes, and culminations, the ones which are more marked and less predictable.

Keywords

• Inherent aspect. Imperfective periphrasis. Imperfect past tense.
• Inherent aspect
• Imperfective periphrasis
• Imperfect past tense