本研究參考王(2005)的研究，探討台灣國中生在英語現在完成式的學習表現。研究對象為台北縣120名國三學生，測驗學生在40分鐘內填答包含文法正確性判斷是非題、時態填充題及中英翻譯題共計50道題目。研究重點在：(1)受試者對時態和時貌的理解；(2) 現在完成式的誤用情形；(3) 現在完成式不同功能的習得，以及 (4) 母語的影響及對副詞的依賴狀況。研究發現如下：首先，學習者在中文及英文的時態時貌表現有理解上的困難，顯示他們並未真正理解中英文表達時間概念的差異。其次，現在完成式的誤用最常發生在現在簡單式及過去簡單式。他們習慣依賴常用於現在式的時間副詞或頻率副詞來決定使用時態，在看到這些副詞時，未真正理解上下文語境意涵而誤用成現在簡單式；而學習者對於過去已完成事件，未意識到其和現在的關聯及說話者態度，所以用過去式。這些結果顯示學習者並未真正理解英文現在式、過去式的真正涵義，也不了解現在完成式核心意涵及其語用功能為何。此外，現在完成式的四個主要功能中，學習者在表動作連續性的完成態 (continuative perfect)和表經驗的完成態 (experiential perfect)表現的最理想。而中文的影響顯示學習者習慣依賴副詞來決定使用時態為何，有副詞的句子或情境現在完成式的答對率偏高。研究進一步發現動詞特性會影響學習者對現在完成式的使用判斷，學生在狀態類動詞（包含心智類動詞）用於現在完成式的理解表現較差，此結果可能和中英文的差異有關。此外，檢視國中課本中現在完成式呈現方式的結果顯示這四種功能出現的語言輸入次數和學生的學習速率並未有直接關係，很可能是單句（不含上下文）的呈現方式讓學生有不完整的概念，因此建議教科書或文法書作者避免僅提供單句式例句及過度強調副詞的搭配。最後，教授現在完成式的老師本身應該對中文及英文的時間概念及時態、時貌有清楚的認識，無論是在給予講解範例、課堂練習或評量測驗，都應給予上下文情境讓學生能理解事件時間的相對應關係及覺察到說話者的觀點來決定是否該事件有現在關連性(current relevance) 而能正確使用現在完成式。本研究最後參考幾位研究者觀點及根據研究發現提出一些教授現在完成式的建議。 / This study explores Taiwanese junior high students’ performance on the English present perfect use. One hundred and twenty participants in Taipei County finished 50 questions out of three types of elicitation questions within 40 minutes. The test included a grammaticality judgment task, a blank-filling test and a translation task. The analyses focus on (1) learners’ awareness of tense/aspect; (2) misuses of other tense/aspect forms for the present perfect; (3) acquisition rates of the four functions of the present perfect, and (4) L1 interference and dependence on the adverbials. The main findings are as follows. First, the learners have difficulty acquiring the concept of tense/aspect for the difference of the temporal concepts of Chinese and English. Then, misuses of other tense/aspect forms for the present perfect mainly fall on simple past and simple present. The former misuse may result from the fact that learners do not see completed past events’ relations to the speech moment and neglect the speaker’s attitude; the latter misuse is observed to happen when learners rely much on certain temporal markings that goes mostly with the simple present and thus their judgment on tense/aspect use is misled. These results suggest that learners do not fully understand the semantics of the present simple and past simple, nor do they comprehend the semantic and pragmatic meanings of the present perfect. Furthermore, L1 interference can be witnessed in learner’s reliance on the adverbials. The accuracy rate increases in contexts with certain adverbials. As for the performance on the four uses of the present perfect, learners demonstrate satisfactory performance on the ‘continuative perfect’ and ‘experiential perfect’. A close look into learners’ errors also reveals that lexical aspect plays a role in the comprehension of the present perfect; learners have difficulty in using stative verbs (including mental verbs) in the present perfect. Such performance may result from the difference of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect between Chinese and English. A review on the presentation of the present perfect in the domestic textbooks then discloses that frequency of input alone cannot be responsible for the differentiated acquisition rates. It is, however, the isolated sentence patterns that lead the learners to form rudimentary concepts about the perfect aspect. It is therefore suggested that textbook or grammar book writers avoid sentential examples and overemphasis of its association with certain adverbials. Last but not the least, classroom teachers who are to teach the present perfect should equip themselves with the distinct concepts of tense/aspect between English and Chinese. On giving modeling examples, drill practices, or assessment, contexts should always be given for learners to anchor the relational concept of time so that they make appropriate tense/aspect uses.

The question of adverbs and the meaning of the present perfect across varieties of English is central to sociolinguistic variationist methodologies that have approached the study of the present perfect (Winford, 1993; Tagliamonte, 1997; van Herk, 2008, 2010; Davydova, 2010; Tagliamonte, 2013). This dissertation attempts to disentangle the effect of adverbial support from the three canonical readings of the present perfect (Resultative, Experiential and Continuative). Canadian English, an understudied variety of English, is used to situate the results seen in the Early Modern English data. Early Modern English reflects the time period in which English has acquired the full modern use of the present perfect with the three readings. In order to address both these questions and current controversies over statistical models in sociolinguistics, different statistical models are used: both the traditional Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005) and the newer mixed-effects logistic regression (Johnson, 2009). What is missing from the previous literature in sociolinguistics that advocates logistic mixed-effects models, and provided in this dissertation, is a clear statement of where they are inappropriate to use and their limitations. The rate of adverbial marking of the present perfect in Canadian English falls between rates reported for US and British English in previous studies. The data show in both time periods that while adverbs are highly favored in continuative contexts, they are strongly disfavored in experiential and resultative contexts. In Early Modern English, adverbial support functions statistically differently for resultatives and experientials, but that difference collapses in the Canadian English sample. Both this and the other linguistic contexts support a different analysis for each set of data with respect to adverbial independence from the meaning of the present perfect form. Finally, when the focus of the analysis is on linguistic rather than social factors, both the traditional and newer models provide similar results. Where there are differences, however, these can be accounted for by the number of tokens and different estimation techniques for each model.

This thesis is a sociolinguistic study of Preterit and Present Perfect (PP) usage in contemporary and earlier Argentinian River Plate Spanish (ARPS). The data analyzed stem from a 244,034-word corpus collected for the purposes of the study, including contemporary casual conversation, sociolinguistic interviews, participant observation, written questionnaires, and newspapers spanning the 19th–21st centuries. / The study is motivated by previous claims that in Latin America the PP is restricted to contexts that extend into the present time, resembling Peninsular medieval and Renaissance usage (e.g. Lope Blanch 1972: 138; Harris 1982: 50; Squartini & Bertinetto 2000: 413). I challenge this proposal showing that (1) ARPS has undergone its own development, and (2) Latin American varieties do not represent earlier frozen developmental stages akin to earlier Peninsular Spanish. / Although low in overall frequency, the contemporary ARPS PP is used in experiential settings to express indefinite past (a vernacular use). Moreover, multivariate analysis of the contemporary oral data reveals that the ARPS PP is not aspectually restricted to repetitive and iterative contexts extending into speech time – contrary to Schwenter and Torres Cacoullos’ (2008) findings for contemporary oral Mexican Spanish. Indeed, the data show that the ARPS continuative PP is losing its link-to-present requirement. The ARPS PP also features minimally in resultative and continuative settings, supporting layering of old and new grammaticalizing structures (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994: 21). Present relevance does not determine ARPS PP usage and is instead encoded through the Preterit and temporal adverbials (TAs). / Historically, the PP has dwindled in usage frequency since the 19th century and the Preterit has invaded the spaces erstwhile occupied by the PP. PP functions like result, continuity, current relevance, and hot news are currently fulfilled by the Preterit, in combination with TAs (TA + VERB-PRET). I argue that the TA + VERB-PRET construction has emerged as a periphrastic encoder of PP nuances, a development reminiscent of perfect periphrases in languages such as Yoruba and Karaboro (Niger-Congo) (Dahl 1985: 130). A contemporary example of this construction includes the widespread temporal marker ahí ‘at this point in time’ (lit. ‘there’) in combination with the Preterit to indicate temporal immediacy. / The contemporary ARPS PP is sociolinguistically constrained; men use it significantly more often than women. The PP is also employed by younger speakers, challenging the position that this form is on the verge of extinction (Kubarth 1992a: 565; Burgos 2004: 103). In contrast to the contention that the PP occurs more frequently in written media (e.g. De Kock 1989: 489; Squartini & Bertinetto 2000: 413), the contemporary oral and newspaper corpora show similar distributional tendencies. Only in the questionnaire is the PP used more readily in ways unattested in oral interaction (i.e. in current relevance and past perfective settings). ARPS ambivalent use of the PP represents the essence of the so-called “actuation problem”; that is, the contention that the process of linguistic change involves stimuli and constraints from both society and from the structure of language (Weinrech, Labov & Herzog 1968: 186).

FONSECA, Maria Cristina Micelli. A semântica e a pragmática na compreensão das oposições present perfect X past simple do inglês e pretérito perfecto X pretérito indefinido do espanhol. 2006. 229f. Tese (Doutorado) - Universidade de São Paulo, Departamento de Linguística, São Paulo, 2006. / Submitted by anizia almeida (aniziaalmeida80@gmail.com) on 2016-09-09T11:22:10Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2006_tese_mcmfonseca.pdf: 2203074 bytes, checksum: 6e6d060283ef30feaa9761f29f478e51 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-09-13T14:39:48Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2006_tese_mcmfonseca.pdf: 2203074 bytes, checksum: 6e6d060283ef30feaa9761f29f478e51 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-13T14:39:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2006_tese_mcmfonseca.pdf: 2203074 bytes, checksum: 6e6d060283ef30feaa9761f29f478e51 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / In this thesis, the roles of Semantics and Pragmatics in text comprehension tasks have been investigated in Portuguese speakers interlanguage early grammar. The texts in both English and Spanish had past events told employing Present Perfect x Past Simple and Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido pairings. We have adopted (Michaellis, 1998) that the English periphrasis has as its most salient meaning the resultative reading and have applied it to the Spanish periphrasis as well. Portuguese, on the other hand, expresses resultative meaning in different ways most of the times leading students to see in the Present Perfect and Pretérito Perfecto structures the past event meaning alone. Consequently, when analyzing the foreign language structures, learners end up assigning them the aspectual values which belong to the Portuguese [TER+Participle] and [ESTAR+Gerund] periphrases, despite their not sharing the same aspectual values most of the time, because the English and Spanish forms express the perfective and resultative aspect, while the Portuguese periphrasis indicates the imperfective and durative aspect. This mismatch affects text comprehension, but is not perceived by the students. Learners first analyze the target language structure (topdown procedure, Liceras, 2003a), once they cannot have access to the features which trigger the parameter setting, precluding a bottom-up procedure. The same pattern of value assignment from the L1 periphrasis to both L2 is noticeable in both English and Spanish interlanguages. Analysis of Variance tests have proven that both interlanguages undergo the same process, which starts from L1 reestructuring. This fact suggests that adult L2 learner will make use of UG principles, but will not set parameters the way children do, L2 will grow by reestructuring portions of L1. The semantic values applied in both English and Spanish interlanguages at this stage, are L1?s as well, allowing a comparison to the phonology acquisition. Children are born sensitive to any semantic value, but due to a critical period for semantics, adult L2 learners will acquire L2 semantic values by reestructing not only the syntax of L1 but also its semantic values. Learners will have access to pragmatics, after semantics, as a fine-tuned meaning. / Nesta tese observa-se o papel que a semântica e a pragmática desempenham, na gramática inicial (early grammar) da interlingua de falantes de português, na compreensão de textos em inglês e em espanhol nos quais se relatam eventos passados e se empregam as oposições Present Perfect x Past Simple e Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido. Assumimos (Michaellis, 1998) que um dos valores mais fortes das formas compostas dessas duas línguas é o resultativo e que como o português, na maioria das vezes, expressa o resultado de outros modos, o aprendiz vê naquelas apenas uma maneira de expressar ações passadas. Em função disso, ao analisar a estrutura na língua estrangeira, acaba atribuindo aos tempos compostos de ambas os valores aspectuais das perífrases (TER+Particípio) e (ESTAR+Gerúndio) do português, que em muitos casos não coincide com os valores das formas perifrásticas das línguas que estão aprendendo. Enquanto as perífrases da língua estrangeira têm o aspecto perfectivo resultativo, as do português tem valor imperfectivo continuativo. Tal fato, que afeta a compreensão do texto, não é percebido pelos aprendizes. Estes analisam primeiramente a sintaxe da língua-alvo (top-drow procedure, Liceras, 2003a) uma vez que não tem acesso aos traços que desencadeiam a fixação de parâmetros para a realização do bottom-up. O padrão de atribuição dos valores das perífrases da L1 para a L2 aparece nas interlínguas do espanhol e do inglês, apontando para um mesmo processo, independente de a língua-alvo ser mais ou menos próxima do português. Testes com análise de variância comprovam que se trata de um mesmo processo para as duas línguas, que começa a partir da reestruturação da L1, sugerindo que a aquisição dessa é regida pelos princípios da GU, mas que a marcação de parâmetros não acontecerá como na L1, mas se dará via reestruturação de porções da L1. os valores semânticos utilizados na interlíngua, com a fonologia, a criança nasce com sensibilidade para acessar qualquer valor semântico, mas existe um período crítico que faz com que a aquisição da L2 ocorra por reestruturação não apenas sintática mas também semântica dos valores da L1. A pragmática, por sua vez, será acessada, após a semântica, como uma sintonia fina do sentido.

The Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994; 1996) proposes that the inherent lexical aspect of verbs plays a major role in the acquisition of tense-aspect (TA) morphology in both first and second language. This has been attested in most studies on TA morphology conducted with past and present TA markers. The present study examined the acquisition of Present Perfect, a rather insufficiently studied TA form from a Prototype Account, in two of its four functions, Experiential Past and Persistent Situation. The subjects were 85 L1-Spanish English language learners at intermediate and advanced levels. All participants had received formal instruction in English grammar as part of their curriculum. The data was collected through a forced-choice task with 16 situations equally distributed between the two Present Perfect functions and between telic and atelic verbs of four semantic categories: stative, activities, achievements, and accomplishments. Participants had to choose the correct verb form out of three options (Present, Past or Present Perfect) that would best complete the sentences given. The results showed evidence of clear developmental stages in the acquisition of the Present Perfect. The stages were characterized by an important role of proficiency level and lexical aspect as the more proficient participants showed a more accurate use of the target form. In addition, both the intermediate and advanced groups showed a tendency towards employing Persistent Situation with atelic verb types, whereas they used Experiential Past with telic verbs. Contrary to the predictions of the AH, the use that seemed to be first acquired and easier to learn was Persistent Situation, which obtained higher correctness rates in both groups than Experiential Past. When the results were analyzed across each aspectual verb type, the pattern of acquisition was less clear and thereby partly met the claims of the AH. This irregular trend attested in the data encouraged the argument that the acquisition of the functions of the Present Perfect may not be solely influenced by lexical aspect and verb prototypicality but several other factors may be at stake, such as sentence-type effect, input distribution, L1 transfer and rote-learned forms. Therefore, developmental stages in the acquisition of the Present Perfect should be examined in view of an interplay of "multiple factors" as already proposed by Sugaya and Shirai (2007), which work simultaneously and in a complementary fashion in the acquisitional process of TA morphology.

The question of adverbs and the meaning of the present perfect across varieties of English is central to sociolinguistic variationist methodologies that have approached the study of the present perfect (Winford, 1993; Tagliamonte, 1997; van Herk, 2008, 2010; Davydova, 2010; Tagliamonte, 2013). This dissertation attempts to disentangle the effect of adverbial support from the three canonical readings of the present perfect (Resultative, Experiential and Continuative). Canadian English, an understudied variety of English, is used to situate the results seen in the Early Modern English data. Early Modern English reflects the time period in which English has acquired the full modern use of the present perfect with the three readings. In order to address both these questions and current controversies over statistical models in sociolinguistics, different statistical models are used: both the traditional Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005) and the newer mixed-effects logistic regression (Johnson, 2009). What is missing from the previous literature in sociolinguistics that advocates logistic mixed-effects models, and provided in this dissertation, is a clear statement of where they are inappropriate to use and their limitations. The rate of adverbial marking of the present perfect in Canadian English falls between rates reported for US and British English in previous studies. The data show in both time periods that while adverbs are highly favored in continuative contexts, they are strongly disfavored in experiential and resultative contexts. In Early Modern English, adverbial support functions statistically differently for resultatives and experientials, but that difference collapses in the Canadian English sample. Both this and the other linguistic contexts support a different analysis for each set of data with respect to adverbial independence from the meaning of the present perfect form. Finally, when the focus of the analysis is on linguistic rather than social factors, both the traditional and newer models provide similar results. Where there are differences, however, these can be accounted for by the number of tokens and different estimation techniques for each model.

Orientador : Linda Gentry El-Dash / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T01:07:45Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Elizi_CesarEduardoDuarte_M.pdf: 195109 bytes, checksum: 20ae879bedc5d26fdf03f2805bcd97c7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 / Resumo: Essa dissertação visa avaliar a utilização de atividades de Foco na Forma na aquisição, por alunos brasileiros, do tempo verbal Present Perfect através de uma comparação com a Abordagem Comunicativa tradicional. Tal abordagem apresenta, apesar de diversas vantagens, uma limitação na competência gramatical final atingida por alunos de línguas estrangeiras. Uma possível causa dessa limitação, além de outras, é a insuficiência do insumo em fornecer ao aprendiz evidência negativa, i.e. informação sobre a agramaticalidade de frases para as quais L2 é um subconjunto de L1. O que vem sendo chamado de Foco na Forma (FonF, do inglês Focus on Form) funciona como uma intervenção em que se direciona a atenção do aprendiz para aspectos de L2 em meio a uma atividade que privilegia a troca de significados. Desta forma, ao contrário do que ocorre com o Foco nas FormaS (seguindo a nomenclatura de Michael Long ), o FonF não interrompe o ato comunicativo para o estudo e prática de itens gramaticais de maneira isolada, mas busca produzir um desvio temporário de atenção, por parte do aprendiz, enquanto este está empenhado em realizar uma tarefa de compreensão ou produção. Descrevemos o Present Perfect como uma estrutura de difícil análise por parte do aluno brasileiro. Isto se deve, em parte, à má qualidade da maioria dos materiais didáticos disponíveis em relação a essa estrutura. O experimento realizado comparou dez salas de aula de quinto estágio de inglês com relação ao desempenho em pré e pós testes que avaliavam a habilidade dos alunos em (a) reconhecer a forma verbal correta para frases em meio a distratores, (b) identificar frases contendo a estrutura alvo como gramaticais ou não e (c) reproduzir por escrito um texto lido pelo professor contendo quatro ocorrências da estrutura alvo. Entre os dois testes utilizou-se três tipos de tratamento : (1) baseado em compreensão de textos; (2) baseado na reprodução escrita de textos e (3) sem Foco na Forma. Os resultados obtidos se mostram favoráveis ao uso de FonF para o Present Perfect e sugerem que atividades de compreensão de texto são mais benéficas que as de reprodução. Uma pergunta de conscientização ( o que você aprendeu?) feita à parte dos grupos dos tratamentos (1) e (2) resultou em uma melhoria de desempenho ainda maior para o grupo de compreensão de textos. Isto nos leva à hipótese de que convidar o aluno a refletir sobre sua aprendizagem auxilia na percepção de elementos novos, possivelmente por ativar processos cognitivos apenas disponíveis (sobretudo no tocante à filtragem de estímulos presentes no insumo) quando o objeto de estudo desperta no aluno um elemento de relevância pessoal / Abstract: The objective of this dissertation is to evaluate the use of Focus on Form in the acquisition of the verb tense Present Perfect by Brazilian students through a comparison with the traditional Communicative approach. This approach presents, despite several advantages, a limitation in the final grammatical competence attained by students. A possible reason for such limitation, among others, is the insufficiency of input alone in providing negative evidence, i.e. information about the agrammaticality of phrases for which L2 is a subset of L1. What has been labeled as Focus on Form, or FonF for short, is an intervention in which we direct students¿ attention to aspects of L2 during an activity aimed at the exchange of meaning. In this way, unlike what happens with Focus on FormS ( following Michael Long¿s terminology), FonF does not interrupt a communicative act in exchange for the isolated study and practice of grammar structures, but tries to divert students¿ attention momentarily, while they are engaged in a meaningful comprehension or production task. The Present Perfect is a structure which presents several difficulties to the Brazilian learner. This is partly due to the misleading explanations presented by most textbooks available. The experiment compared ten groups at level 5 in terms of their performance in pre and post tests. These tests evaluated the students¿ ability to (a) select the correct verb forms for incomplete sentences among distractors; (b) classify sentences containing the target-structure as either grammatically correct or not and (c) reconstruct in writing a text read aloud by the teacher which contained four instances of the target structure. Three different treatments were used : (1) with FonF tasks based on reading comprehension; (2) with FonF tasks based on text reconstruction and (3) without FonF. The results are in favour of the use of FonF activities for the Present Perfect and suggest that reading comprehension tasks are more beneficial than the text reconstruction ones. An awareness-raising question (what did you learn?) which was asked to some of the groups (1) and (2) resulted in an even better performance by the groups working with reading comprehension tasks. This has led to the hypothesis that asking the students to reflect upon their learning facilitates the noticing of new elements, possibly by activating cognitive processes only available ( particularly in what concerns the filtering of stimuli present in the input) when the object of study triggers an element of personal relevance in the student / Mestrado / Mestre em Linguística Aplicada

The aim of this study is to examine the teachers’ attitudes towards teaching the Spanish verb tense pretérito indefinido which corresponds to the preterite tense in English. In the Swedish Compulsory School teachers generally avoid introducing this verb tense in the second level even though this form is more frequent in oral and written Spanish than the present perfect tense. According to previous studies and teachers’ own experience, after four years of studying Spanish the students barely have any understanding of the preterite tense. Therefore, we wanted to find out the teachers’ attitudes towards introducing this verb tense earlier than is the case in today’s school system. The study was carried out with fifty informants who answered a questionnaire divided into two parts, where the first is related to general questions such as age, native language, and experience of teaching. In the second part of the study, the informants rated their agreement or disagreement to 12 statements on a Likert scale. The results of the analysis indicate that the majority of the informants has a positive attitude towards introducing the preterite tense earlier, although some of the informants prefer to teach the present perfect for different reasons. The study also showed that language background and regional variations have an impact on their attitudes.

Most Brazilian students learning English face difficulty when studying thepresent perfect. It is one of the most challenging aspects of the Englishlanguage for Portuguese speakers due to the similar form with a divergentsemantic value. The Brazilian Portuguese present perfect forces iteration andthe student automatically transfers the same meaning when translating anEnglish sentence literally. Brazilian learners get confused about when and inwhat situations to use the English present perfect and frequently are not able todistinguish it from the simple past use. This study is comprised of two parts.First, a comparative study was done to investigate which Portuguese tensetranslators of famous literary books consider to be equivalent to the Englishpresent perfect according to the message which is being conveyed. Thedatabase used was the bidirectional parallel corpus of English and PortugueseCOMPARA. Second, textbooks developed to teach English in Brazil wereanalyzed in order to verify from what perspective students were beinginstructed concerning the present perfect and whether the semantic differencesbetween the two languages were pointed out. According to the translationcorpus, the English present perfect is mostly equivalent to Brazilian Portuguesesimple past. Adverbs are also often needed to express the English presentperfect meaning in Portuguese. The textbooks were found to present poorexplanations and seem not to call the learners’ attention to the source of the problems. Textbooks do not stress the importance of the semantic value and thecontext, and do not call attention to the different meanings between theBrazilian and the English present perfect.

Comparison of the Tense Systems in Spanish and French: the Use of the Present Perfect and Past Simple This paper is concerned with tenses in Spanish and in French. First they are analysed generally, from the theoretical point of view, and subsequently, the author focuses on comparing the use of two of them: the present perfect and the past simple. The author is building on the conviction that although the verb systems of Roman languages are nearly identical, and also that the basic values of their tenses are identical, their specific uses may differ. First, she examines how tenses participate in the expression of time in language and how they can refer to extralinguistic time. As much attention has been paid to this topic, part one of the paper examines the theories that have been reflected the most in works on Spanish and French verbs. The fact that each of them emphasises a different aspect in explaining the meaning and function of each tense allows us to better understand the fundamental value of the tenses. One chapter is devoted to the diachronic view of the Roman system of verbs which allows us to see which features and development tendencies are common to all Roman languages, and which are only found in some of them. Here, the author points out primarily the fact that the loss of the...