La función modal y evidencial del pretérito imperfecto. Un análisis de corpus basado en CREA

Abstract

In some cases, the Spanish imperfect can implicitly make reference to the indirect speaker’s knowledge about the situation expressed in his utterance (modal function), thus marking an external information source without mentioning it (evidential function). In this way, the speaker dissociates himself from the content of his utterance and the truth-value of the utterance is constrained. In this contribution a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the modal and evidential function of the Spanish imperfect based on the Corpus of the Real Academia Española (CREA) of the section ‘periódicos’ and of the peninsular Spanish will be made. The modal and evidential use of the Spanish imperfect will be explained and analyzed through some representative examples (qualitative analysis) and statistical data about theses uses will be provided (quantitative analysis). Furthermore, it will be observed if the Spanish imperfect can express the modal and evidential function by its own or if it needs some contextual elements at the sentence level which corroborate the modal and evidential meaning. Both for the qualitative and quantitative corpus punctual and perfective verbs, such as reconocer (‘to recognize’), ascender (‘to rise’), pagar (‘to pay’), morir (‘to die’) and estallar (‘to explode’) have been chosen because they combine better with the perfective form (cf. NGLE 2009: 1763) and their uses in the imperfective form (in the Spanish imperfect) is very uncommon. It will be also proved if their uses in the Spanish imperfect can motivate some modal and evidential function.