Pretérito perfecto compuesto vs. pretérito simple: su adquisición en portugués por hablantes de español

Abstract

Spanish-speaking students of Portuguese have problems discovering the different use of the present perfect (PC) and simple past (PS) (tenho feito/fiz) in that language. The PC in Portuguese, in spite of declarations that its use is very similar to that of American Spanish in general, has constraints that limit its use to durative or iterative situations in the past that come up to and include the moment of speech. In this study, we look at what these differences are and if the students who only have had access to natural input are capable of discovering the different rules. The investigation was done initially with an instrument of 40 items which was applied to 110 Spanish-speaking students of Portuguese of all levels. A follow-up study was done with two groups of fourth level – medium advanced- which received explicit instruction on the point. They were compared with two groups of fourth level from the first 110 students, who had not received instruction.