R: Re: Tense & Aspect

[Rick Mc Callister]

>> Miguel said:

>> >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in
>> >favour of the preterit.

>1)
>In the Castilian spoken in *Galicia* ("Castrapo"), the usage is as in
>Argentinian Spanish
>See Pilar Va'quez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid,
>1971, p. 95, who speaks of "..the preference for the "pret. indefinido"
>instead of the "perfecto compuesto", i.e. "vi" instead of "he visto".
>Also,
>Alonso Zamora Vicente , "Dialectologia espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid,
>1979, p. 208, says that in some *Asturian* regions, the periphrastic perfect
>is not used and that even in the cultured speech of some families, in
>Castilian, the use of the composed forms is rejected, e.g. " ? oiste lo que
>digo? "; " hoy llovio' todo el di'a ".
>North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, is considered, rightly or wrongly,
>the most Celtic area of Spain.

I've heard Argentines and other South Americans use present perfect
[prete/rito perfecto] pretty much the same way as Central Americans do --in
an emphatic sense. The type of emphasis depends on the intonation of the
speaker.

	¿Has ido a la playa? Have you ever been to the beach?
	¿Has terminado la tarea? DID you FINISH the homework!?
	Ha llovido todo el di/a. It HAS RAINED [It's been raining] all day!

It's definitely not used as an everyday form and overusage of it does
suggest that the speaker is either a Mexican or a non-native speaker. Not
all Mexicans overuse this and other compound tenses but they are often
stereotyped by other Latin Americans as speaking Spanish with grammatical
influence from American English.
	While Mexican Spanish seems to me to have less English vocabulary
than Central American and Caribbean Spanish, its grammar does seem to
conform to English usage in the greater use of present perfect, present
progressive, and periphrastic future as well as its simplified subjunctive
and avoidance of imperatives by many Mexicans.