Preterit and Perfect in Romance: New Insights from Occitan

AbstractThis paper gives an account of Simple Past and Compound Past, for the Lengadocian variety of Occitan, based on a written corpus taken from the text base BaTelÒc. SP and CP are in a complementary distribution. The main use of SP corresponds to a perfective/aoristic value, which locates an event in the past. It can convey narrative progress, switch to a narrative context, or describe an elaborating event. The SP clause can be modified by temporal locating adverbials referring to a past time interval. The main value of CP is a perfect resultative one with present relevance. It can also be used to report an event in a time interval not ended at Speech Time. Finally, we compare these tenses with preterits and perfects in Romance languages and conclude that they have rather prototypical preterit and perfect functions.