Pregunta sobre español y portugués

[Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg]

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Editor:
Carlos Subirats Rüggeberg <Carlos.Subirats at uab.es>
Colaboradoras:
Paola Bentivoglio <pbentivo at reacciun.ve>, UCV
Eulalia de Bobes <ebobes at seneca.uab.es>, UAB
Mar Cruz <mcruz at lingua.fil.ub.es>, UB
Emma Martinell <martinell at lingua.fil.ub.es>, UB
_____________________________________________________

          Pregunta sobre español y portugués
De: Linguist List, Mark Davies <mdavies at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
_____________________________________________________

I'm starting into some research on the historical
development of the following type of constructions in
Spanish and Portuguese:

   a) "John has been working for three hours"
   b) "John had been working for three hours, when..."
   c) "I've been working here since 1995"

A couple of questions:

1) Is there a specific name for this subset of the perfect
tense/aspect, which refers to the amount of time that an
action or state has been in progress since a point in the
past?

2) I'd like to collect as many examples as possible of this
type of construction in other languages.  I would
appreciate any email messages to me in which you could
gloss these three sentences in another language, e.g.
SPANISH
   a) hace tres horas que Juan trabaja
      makes three hours that J. works
     "John has been working for three hours"
   b) hacia tres horas que Juan trabajaba
      make-IMPF three hours that J. work-IMPF
     "John had been working for three hours, when . . ."
   c) trabajo aca desde 1995
      I-work here since 1995
     "I've been working here since 1995"

I'd be happy to post a summary of these responses if there
is sufficient interest. Thanks in advance,

Mark Davies, Assistant Professor, Spanish Linguistics
Dept. of Foreign Languages, Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790-4300
Voice:309/438-7975  email:mdavies at ilstu.edu
Fax:309/438-8038    http://138.87.135.33/~mdavies/

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