Teaching Verb Tenses at Secondary School: the opposition between the Spanish Preterit and Imperfect Tenses

In accordance with the Prototypical-Cognitive Approach (Langacker, 1987, 1991; Lakoff, 1987; Hopper, 1988, among others) which postulates that Semantics and Pragmatics are motivated by Syntax and consequently the latter emerges from discourse, the present study proposes a set of exercises to teach the Spanish Preterit (SP) and Imperfect (I) opposition in Secondary School. This paper is based on the results of our previous work, which demonstrated that in the opposition between the SP and the I, each verb tense has a cluster of semantic attributes which define them, depending on the context in which they occur and on the speaker's communicative purpose. These attributes are related not only to the grammatical aspect of the verb but to the discursive function that each tense fulfils in a given text. In order to confirm this hypothesis, a corpus of narrative texts has been compiled, from which the uses of Spanish Preterit and Imperfect have been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Data analysis demonstrates that the SP prototype has the attributes of a 'completed event' and of a 'telic event' whereas the Imperfect prototype has mainly the attribute of 'description'. On the basis of the results obtained, we have developed a teaching proposal of the SP-I opposition for students of the first year of a secondary school in Buenos Aires, Argentina.