The Prehodiernal Use of the Present Perfect from the Viewpoint of Personal Deixis

The article examines whether personal deixis plays any role in the introduction of the aoristic present perfect in prehodiernal ('before today') contexts in Spanish. The results of Kempas (2006), based on elicitation tests carried out in mainland Spain and in Santiago del Estero, Argentina, are considered from the point of view of personal deixis. The possible influence of personal deixis is also studied in view of the syntactic position of prehodiernal adverbial modifiers and the distance of the past event from the moment of utterance. The study rules out the role of personal deixis in the prehodiernal use of the present perfect. Instead, transformativity (as an actional category) and subjunctivity emerge as more plausible factors. In this respect, Spanish also differs from French and Italian, in which personal deixis does play or has played a role in the choice between the aoristic simple and compound perfects. Adapted from the source document