| This study offers an empirical account of Spanish Present Perfect (PP) variation in a corpus of Salvadoran speech recorded in San Sebastian, El Salvador in 2000. Refining the parameters set forth by Comrie (1976), a typology of PP uses to account for all occurrences of PP in the data is developed. Co-occurrence patterns indicate prototypical associations of lexical aspect, adverbial modification, and pragmatic context with the particular PP uses that emerge in the data. For example, the Perfect of Result prototypically occurs in contexts with (physical) evidence of transformation or change at the moment of speech, process verbs, and contrasting adverbials such as hoy 'now', while prototypical features of the Perfect of Persistent Situation are durative adverbials, negative polarity, and statives. Thus, rather than general associations between certain semantic classes of verbs, lexical aspects, or adverbials, and the PP, we find such associations with particular PP uses.; Comparisons are drawn with other dialects of Spanish. The PP construction has advanced further along the cross-linguistic resultative-to-perfect-to-perfective grammaticization path (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994) in Salvadoran than Mexican Spanish. In narrative discourse, PP encroaches on the Preterit in evaluation sections, outside the main chain of events. More generally, PP grammaticization involves generalization, yet no particular perfect use is a clear source for another, nor does any one particular perfect use give rise to perfective. Instead, the different PP uses are the result of parallel developments and all PP uses may generalize to perfective as they spread beyond their prototypical contexts, that is, it is marginal instances that are the locus of change. The generalization from "current relevance" to a perfective with no pragmatic ties to the moment of speech in the Salvadoran data proceeds not via a gradual temporal drifting-away from the moment of speech, as in Peninsular varieties with a hodiernal stage (Schwenter 1994), but rather via the incorporation of different lexical aspect types. Multivariate analysis of PP-Preterit variation indicates that PP in Salvadoran Spanish is favored by non-punctual (repeated) events, subordinate clauses, situations where the temporal frame is not clear, inanimate subjects, and negation or questions. |
