Resumen de Tense and aspect
Pier Marco Bertinetto, Mario Squartini
This chapter addresses some of the most striking and interesting problems and questions related to tense and aspect in Romance. It covers the distribution of most widespread temporal and aspectual grammaticalized distinctions, including the expression of perfective past, future and future in the past; auxiliary constructions, and various aspectual categories; relationship and competition between synthetic and periphrastic forms; development of aspectual markers into temporal markers and the relative discreteness of tense and aspect as grammatical categories; distribution and value of doubly-compound forms. Specific topics dealt with include: temporal and aspectual values in present and past ‘simple’ tenses; the present: temporal and aspectual flexibility; perfective and imperfective pasts; simple past and its analytic competitors; compound forms: resultatives, perfects, and perfectives; resultative constructions; ‘aoristic drift’; specialized perfects (inclusive only; experiential only); competing pluperfects and doubly-compound forms; aspectual and phasal periphrases; progressive periphrases; habitual and phasal periphrases; futures (tense interacting with modality; modal uncertainty and prospectivity; futures-in-the-past).
