El papel de la indefinición temporal en la selección de canté y he cantado: nuevas evidencias sobre los perfectos del español canario

Abstract

This contribution analyses the uses of the past forms canté and he cantado in the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands for the purpose of establishing, according to temporal criteria, the values manifested by these tenses in the island speech. Namely, the aim is to show 1) that the Canary model represents a transitional system between the Spanish varieties in which the present perfect is unknown and those where it experienced a strong development, and 2) that the concept of temporal (in)definiteness plays a key role in the contrast between both forms. To that end, we will study more than 400 contextualized forms taken from the interviews of the Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish, whose analysis confirms the working hypothesis.