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The normative use of past tenses is supposed to be a big challenge for learners of Spanish. Although they might understand the grammatical chapter in theory, adequate past tense use in spontaneous oral production is not guaranteed. Morphological errors, overgeneralizations of tenses and interferences with other languages characterize the interlanguage of the learners. Based on two corpuses, we analyse how the past tense use differs between secondary school students from Austria and Romance polyglots. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that polyglot speakers surpass the secondary school students in some areas such as the distinction of verbal aspect. However, the students tend less to use the perfecto compuesto in an inadequate way in narration.
This article summarises an examination of sentence patterns in modern European standard Spanish, in order to give an answer to the following questions: How many different sentence patterns are there and which are the most frequent patterns in modern European Spanish? Based on the principles of verb valency, as established by Lucien Tesnière and further developed by Ulrich Engel and others, a corpus of 500 sentences is analysed, identifying the sentence patterns of the main clauses. The analysis shows 19 different sentence patterns, the most frequent of which is p-s-cd, that is, predicate – subject – direct object. Subsequently, the results are compared to those of a different study on Spanish sentence patterns.
Over the past few decades, a multitude of scientific research has been published on the topic of discourse markers, intending to define this linguistic phenomenon. Despite this increase of interest in discourse markers, fundamental questions pivotal to a clear definition remain unanswered. On basis of an empirical analysis of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan discussions, this essay sets out to demonstrate that combining of the two prevailing research approaches (formal-syntactical vs. functional-pragmatic) has advantageous effects on the definition of discourse markers.