Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2011
Abstract
The Portuguese compound perfect differs, in a number of aspects, from other Romance languages including its closest counterpart Spanish. Its role in Portuguese can be generally defined as a means to denote an action starting in the past, lasting till the moment of speech, and probably spanning to the future, that is, characterised by its non-terminativeness.
Analysis of corpus material has shown a clear difference between the use of compound perfect in Spanish and in Portuguese. Of the 620 occurrences in Spanish only 92 were translated using the same tense.