Variation of the simple present and present progressive

Abstract

The current chapter offers an empirical study of simple present and present progressive variation across three Spanish varieties in Peru, comparing two distinct Spanish-speaking monolingual groups, representing the coastal and Amazonian macro-dialects, as well as a bilingual community where the indigenous language Yagua is also spoken. All participants produced simultaneous film narrations, leading to a corpus of oral speech for further analysis. Present-time verbal phrases were extracted and coded for the linguistic factors of adverb, lexical aspect, clause type, animacy of the subject, and negation. Additionally, all progressive constructions were labeled for auxiliary type (estar, andar, ir, etc.). The social factors included in the analysis were Spanish variety, participant age, and sex. The results showed that rates of the estar progressive were highest among the ethnically Yagua Spanish bilinguals, suggesting contact-induced change, as previously reported in studies of English–Spanish bilingualism. The monolingual varieties also evidenced differences in form frequencies, displaying cross-dialectal variation regardless of contact.