The Present Perfect in Stories of Spanish of Acolla (Juní­n)

Abstract

The current research deals with the morphosyntactic behavior of the present perfect in relation to the past simple tense in Spanish of Acolla. The objective was to determine whether the frequency of use of the present perfect is higher than the one of the past simple in past events stories. Our research is based on seventy five Spanish-speaking six-yearold children”™s oral narrative production. Data collecting for the linguistic corpus was through the strategy named by the author as My favorite pet. This procedure proved to be highly effective for our goals. For the relative and absolute frequency analysis of the involved verbal perfect forms, data were entered on Windows AntConc, 3.2.4 software version. The research findings indicate that in Acolla`s Spanish, the present perfect use frequency is significantly higher than the one of the past simple. This result is similar to other Andean Spanish dialects. The conclusion is that in Acolla”™s Spanish past event narratives, the present perfect is the prevalent verbal form over the past simple.