Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
The Spanish verb is obligatorily inflected for aspect in the
past tense: the speaker must indicate by his use of either a
preterite or an imperfect form whether an action is perfective or
imperfective. Because no such obligatory morphological distinction
exists in English, the English-speaking student of Spanish may not
always make the proper distinction between tense and aspect in the
forms of the target language. The problem, then, is to teach the
student to express the aspect of any past verbal action so that he
will be able to choose correctly between the preterite and the
imperfect.
A contrastive analysis of the role of aspect in all tenses of
the verb systems of English and Spanish is presented for the purpose
of ultimately formulating the best possible set of rules for differentiating
between perfective and imperfective past actions.
past tense: the speaker must indicate by his use of either a
preterite or an imperfect form whether an action is perfective or
imperfective. Because no such obligatory morphological distinction
exists in English, the English-speaking student of Spanish may not
always make the proper distinction between tense and aspect in the
forms of the target language. The problem, then, is to teach the
student to express the aspect of any past verbal action so that he
will be able to choose correctly between the preterite and the
imperfect.
A contrastive analysis of the role of aspect in all tenses of
the verb systems of English and Spanish is presented for the purpose
of ultimately formulating the best possible set of rules for differentiating
between perfective and imperfective past actions.
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