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Perfect evolution and change:

A sociolinguistic study of Preterit and Present Perfect usage in contemporary and earlier Argentina

Celeste Rodríguez Louro University of Melbourne

Abstract

The research presented here analyzes the use of the Preterit and the Present Perfect (PP) in Argentinian River Plate Spanish (ARPS), as in (1) and (2) below.

(1) Hoy me desperté a las siete menos cuarto. (SLI08MA62)

‘Today I woke up at 6.45.’

(2) Hoy me he despertado a las 9 menos cuarto. (BCN08MR) ‘Today I have woken up at 8.45.’

Previous cross-linguistic studies have noted the prevailing use of the PP to encode perfectivity in

various languages including French, German, Northern Italian and Spanish (Comrie 1976; Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994; Schwenter 1994a). However, ARPS does not fit the proposed historical development for Spanish (cf. Rodríguez Louro to appear).

The data considered include both contemporary corpora (10 hours of casual conversation, 9 hours of sociolinguistic interviews, and 100 questionnaires), and historical data (87,934 words from magazines and newspapers spanning the 19th – 21st centuries).

All data were analyzed using Golvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte & Smith 2005), a tool for statistical modeling used in variationist sociolinguistic studies. The potential favoring effect of the factor groups of Present Perfect function (including resultative, continuative, current relevance, experiential, hot news, and past perfective contexts), temporal reference, presence/absence of temporal adverbial, grammatical person, style, verb Aktionsart, clause type, presence of ya ‘already’, noun number, polarity, age, gender, and education were considered vis-à-vis Preterit and PP usage. My results reveal the following trends for the contemporary data: (a) The Preterit prevails at 90% (3252/3624) while the PP lags behind at 10% (372/3624).The PP

shows a slight increase in usage as one moves from the most naturally occurring (i.e. casual conversation) to least naturally occurring data (i.e. the questionnaire).

(b) The questionnaire and the oral data behave differently. While six out of twelve factor groups are significant in the questionnaire (p = 0.029), only three out of eleven factor groups are significant in the oral data (p=0.000).

(c) Overall, experiential and resultative/continuative contexts, indeterminate temporal reference, and absence of temporal adverbials favor PP usage.

(d) Contrary to Dahl (1985) and Jara Yupanqui (2006:210), temporal adverbials trigger Preterit, rather than PP usage.

(e) Formal style significantly favors PP use across different functions in the questionnaire (p = 0.029), and in the opinion module of the sociolinguistic interview, in line with Rodriguez Louro’s (2008) observations that the PP is a prestigious sociolinguistic variable in ARPS.

(f) The PP prevails over the Preterit in experiential contexts (at 60.5% [89/147]) in the oral data, and shows no fluctuation across styles in the questionnaire. This suggests the experiential PP (illustrated in (3) through (5) below) is a vernacular feature in ARPS.

(3) He vivido tantas cosas difíciles. (FW08F115)

‘I have lived through so many difficult things.’ (4) ¿Vos has ido (a ese restaurante)? (FW08F19)

‘Have you been to that restaurant?’ (5) He estado (mal) alguna vez. (CC07FC16)

‘I have been depressed sometime.’

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The historical data show a systematic decrease in perfect usage as one approaches the 21st century. Most striking about the 19th century data is the use of the PP in hot news (example 6) and past perfective contexts (example 7), as well as in the presence of specific temporal adverbials such as a las ocho de la mañana ‘at eight in the morning’ (example 8), in line with Schwenter’s (1994a; 1994b) and Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos’ (2008) observations for contemporary Peninsular Spanish.

(6) Noticias: Telegrama de Londres recibido por nosotros que va inserto en la seccion

respectiva, nos hace saber que la negociacion de ese importante empréstito, por su cantidad, ha quedado completamente terminada con las firmas de Baring Brothers y de Morgan. (BAN1885EC)

‘News: A telegram from London received by us and inserted in the respective section informs us that the negotiation of that important transaction with the firms Baring Brothers and Morgan has finished due to its quantity.’

(7) Ayer les ha sido pasada por el secretario del Jury de enjuiciamiento […] la siguiente

invitacion a los miembros del mismo. (BAN1885EC) ‘The following invitation has been passed to the members of the Judiciary yesterday.’ (8) Hoy a las ocho de la mañana se han publicado los decretos de la Asamblea.

(BAN1815GZ) ‘Today at eight in the morning the Assembly’s decrees have been published.’

The data analyzed suggest that, although widely used in the written media in earlier ARPS, PP usage has more recently dwindled. The PP presently appears most frequently in formal styles and in experiential contexts, expressing generic reference (cf. Henderson 2008) and indefinite past (Rodríguez Louro to appear). Resultative and continuative uses of the PP are consonant with retention and persistence typical of grammaticalization processes (Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos 2008: 23). Hot news and past perfective contexts call for Preterit usage, in line with languages displaying no anterior-to-perfective grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994:105). Recent past and current relevance contexts show a negligible use of the PP, favoring periphrastic constructions of the type Preterit + TA. Moreover, these periphrases seem to be grammaticalizing as encoders of result, continuity, and recency in this dialect (cf. Dahl 1985:130; Bybee & Dahl 1989:68; Lindstedt 2000:372; Miller 2004:237).

To conclude, once prominent in earlier media, the ARPS PP has evolved as a vernacular feature encoding indefinite past and as a sociolinguistic indicator of formality, while the periphrasis Preterit + TA has come to express result, continuity, current relevance, and recent past. These developments indicate that, although the anterior-to-perfective grammaticalization attested for Peninsular Spanish as well as for Romance and Germanic, is absent in this variety, the Preterit and the PP show their own evolution as encoders of various temporal nuances. These developments illustrate the importance of language in use as a catalyst for cross-linguistic, and, most importantly, cross-dialectal language change.

References

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Miller, J. (2004). Perfect and resultative constructions in spoken and non-standard English. In Fischer, O., Norde, M. & Perridon, H. (Eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Rodríguez Louro, C. (to appear). El Presente Perfecto en el español rioplatense argentino. Revista de la Sociedad Argentina de Lingüística.

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