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Part of
Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century
Edited by Nancy Stern, Ricardo Otheguy, Wallis Reid and Jaseleen Sackler
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 77] 2019
► pp. 105–122

The relevance of relevance in linguistic analysis

Spanish simple past tenses

| University of Groningen

The Spanish simple past tenses (imperfecto and indefinido) are studied in a literary text, supporting the claim that a discourse-related hypothesis about the meaning of these forms allows for a correct structural analysis and, moreover, enables a revealing literary analysis. That is, the meaning hypothesis not only accounts for the overall distribution of these forms in texts but also allows literary analysts to gather independent evidence for the hypothesis as well as illuminating the interpretations of messages on a literary level. The meaning hypothesis presented in this paper is based on De Jonge (2000a), which proposes that the indefinido is used for eventualities under focus and the imperfecto is used for supportive eventualities. The corpus used for the study was drawn from two short stories by Gabriel García Márquez.

Keywords: communicative strategies, contextual relevance, functional explanation, Gabriel García Márquez, literary analysis, Spanish simple past tenses, Columbia School
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Short overview of the existing theories about the preterit and the imperfect
  • 3.Substance and meaning of the Spanish simple past tenses
  • 4.Testing the meanings quantitatively
  • 5.Discussion of the quantitative analysis
  • 6.Qualitative analysis
  • 7.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.77.04jon
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