Revisiting the past: a semantic-pragmatic study of interrogative forms

The opposition between the Spanish Preterito Simple and Preterit Compuesto (PS/PC) and the delineation of their semantic values in the Iberian Spanish and in the Latin American Spanish has long been the object of grammar studies in the Spanish language. Currently, the most accepted opposition for the Iberian Spanish is related to the concept of an enlarged present for the PC, whereas the PS would be reserved to actions produced at some point in the past which necessarily excludes the moment of speech. Moreover, the studies agree with the fact that in most of Latin America this opposition is not of a temporal nature. In this work, we propose that in the Latin American Spanish the use of the PC is related to linguistic and extra-linguistic specific contexts. From a qualitative analysis of some examples in the corpus, we discuss the factors which act on the determination of which form will be used by the speaker. We also discuss the different semantic interpretations made possible by the PS/PC opposition. In order to make the interpretative differences explicit, we use the concept of mental space from Cognitive Linguistics.