Las funciones del pasado en los sistemas verbales del español y del ruso

This monograph is a comparative study of past time reference in Spanish and Russian.The ambition is to present a functional perspective of how both languages systemically express temporal and aspectual information. The verb, naturally, attracts the main attention of the thesis and the focus is almost exclusively on verbs in the indicative mood.The definition of the parameters of Time and Aspect plays an important part in the present dissertation. A particular emphasis concerns the elaboration and testing of the ‘ABC’ model, which represents a graphic definition of verbal aspect as a grammatical category.Another important issue is the distinction of aspect and Aktionsart; these concepts are closely related but operate on different functional levels. The analysis is essentially based on linguistic material from parallel corpora, constructed for this purpose. At first the material is treated statistically in order to create astarting point for the qualitative part of the analysis. The three main areas of investigation dealt with are:1) The relation between the simple past tenses, pretérito and imperfecto, in Spanish and their imperfective and perfective counterparts in Russian.2) The relation between the compound tenses in Spanish and the Russian verbal system.The analysis of this relation also comprises a critique of the traditional interpretationof the aspectual contents of the compound tenses.3) The usage of alternative strategies in both languages. In this part of the analysis the focus is widened to include verbal periphrasis, infinite verb forms and subordination. The results of the analysis demonstrate that verbal aspect, according to the definition represented by ‘the ABC model’, works as a grammatical category in both Spanish and Russian. It is also shown that there are systemic differences in the manifestation of this functional category in both languages. Another important result is that the neither the compound tenses nor the progressive express verbal aspect, at least not in a narrow sense of the word but represent different verbal functions related to aspect.

Relative durations of post-vocalic consonants in readaloud Spanish by native Swedish L2-learners

Prosody is said to be a persistent feature in foreign accents, particularly in the speech of adult learners. Native Swedish speakers have been reported to lengthen vowels in Spanish as well as post-vocalic consonants in English and German, more than native speakers of the respective languages. The aim of the present study is to examine whether native Swedish learners of Spanish produce increased postvocalic consonant durations in a reading aloud exercise. The text contains certain words that could be expected to trigger complementary consonant lengthening in native Swedish speakers. The result shows that there is no general tendency for native Swedes to lengthen post-vocalic consonants more than native speakers of Spanish in the present speech material. There are examples of longer consonant durations in the speech of the native,Swedish subjects, but it could be a coincidence. A conclusion is that the text used in the study, and probably Spanish as a language, contains few words that are ideal for triggering lengthening of post-vocalic consonants in native Swedish speakers.