Abstract
Romance varieties differ in their usage of preterit and present perfect verb tenses. Both are past perfectives, but whereas Portuguese uses the preterit in most contexts, spoken French prefers the present perfect. Peninsular Spanish lies between the two, though evidence indicates that the present perfect is becoming the default past perfective (Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos 2008) in a process of ‘aoristic drift’ (Squartini and Bertinetto 2000). How does speaker multilingualism affect this? Semi- structured interviews were conducted with second-generation members of the Portuguese diaspora in Andorra. We might expect native competence in Portuguese to inhibit aoristic drift in Spanish, since contact has been shown to affect past perfective verb tense in other Romance varieties (Gili Gaya 1993, Author). Contrary to expectations, participants demonstrated aoristic drift. Dense and multiplex migrant networks are, however, shown to favour the maintenance of vernacular norms (Milroy 1980), including generalising the function of the present perfect.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 154-177 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Spanish in Context |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 14 Feb 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by the British Academy’s Tackling the UK’s International Challenges initiative (reference: IC160082). Many thanks to Katiuska Ferrer Portillo for transcribing the interviews, to Kristine Horner and Sarah Muller for their contributions as members of the research project, and to Damien Mooney and Jonathan Kasstan for their comments on drafts of the article.
Funding Information:
This research was supported by the British Academy’s Tackling the UK’s International Challenges initiative (reference: IC160082 ). Acknowledgements
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 John Benjamins.