La Semana Pasada Hemos Hecho Y Hoy Hicimos

The Past Perfecto Simple and Perfecto Compuesto in the Northern Variety of Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

In this article, the use of the past perfecto simple and perfecto compuesto in the northern variety of peninsular Spanish is approached. In order to do so, we take as a theoretical contribution what is predisposed in the Nueva Gramática de la Real Academia Española of the Royal Spanish Academy (2010) and in works related to the simple and compound past forms and the use of the anterior and previous time markers in this variety of peninsular Spanish, anchoring both past forms. For this, 20 interviews were selected, equally distributed among the regions of Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Galicia and Valencia in an oral linguistic body, the Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América (PRESEEA). After the analysis of the data, it was found that, although the use of the present markers with the perfecto compuesto and anteriority markers with the perfecto simple was predominant, there was a significant percentage of use of present markers anchoring the simple past tense (13%), due to an ancient trace of this past tense type, in the Spanish northern variety, relating to immediate past; and a relative percentage of anteriority markers anchoring the present perfect (6.3%), due to a subjective interpretation of the speaker with respect to the past event, relating it to the moment of speech.