Edited by Nancy Stern, Ricardo Otheguy, Wallis Reid and Jaseleen Sackler
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 77] 2019
► pp. 105–122
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.