The Present Perfect and the Pluperfect as evidentials in the spanish spoken in Quito: A Contrastive Analysis between speakers’ perception and production

Abstract

The present perfect (pretérito perfecto compuesto in Spanish) is the most widely used verb tense in the Spanish language. Its uses vary greatly throughout the Iberian Peninsula and the Hispanic regions of Latin America. Even though the present perfect can adopt some values that are generalized to the whole population that speaks the language, there are also other more innovative values that this tense has acquired in certain regions due to the contact with indigenous languages. Amongst these innovative values, the use of the present perfect as an evidential marker in Andean Spanish stands out. As for the pluperfect (pretérito pluscuamperfecto in Spanish), it is a tense that is interconnected with the present perfect and the preterite indicative (pretérito perfecto simple in Spanish) and, therefore, can alternate uses with these two tenses in some dialectical variations of the language. Hence, it can also occur that the pluperfect be used as an evidential in Andean Spanish. This thesis aims at showing how native speakers of the Andean dialect of Spanish that is spoken in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, perceive the present perfect and the pluperfect when used with evidential values, and how said speakers produce the tenses inside the scope of evidentiality.