Resumo

FUNES, María Soledad  e  POGGIO, Anabella Laura. The opposition between the spanish preterit and imperfect tenses: a cognitive-prototypical proposal. Nueva rev. filol. hisp. [online]. 2021, vol.69, n.1, pp.3-42.  Epub 02-Mar-2021. ISSN 2448-6558.  https://doi.org/10.24201/nrfh.v69i1.3706.

In keeping with the prototypical-cognitive approach, which postulates that semantics and pragmatics are motivated by syntax, the present study formulates the hypothesis that in the opposition between the Spanish preterit and the imperfect, each verb tense has a cluster of semantic attributes which define it, depending on the context in which the tense is used and on the speaker’s communicative purpose. These attributes are related not only to the grammatical aspect of the verb but to the discursive function. In order to confirm this hypothesis, the uses of Spanish preterit and imperfect have been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively in a corpus of narrative texts.

Palavras-chave : prototypical-cognitive approach; Spanish preterit; imperfect; prototype; discourse.