Past Tenses with esta manana 'this morning', with Special Attention to Geographic Variation within Spain

This article deals with the choice between the Preterit & the aoristic Present Perfect with the adverbial modifier 'esta manana' in Peninsular Spanish from the point of view of diatopic variation. Based on empirical results obtained by means of elicitation tests, the speaker's geographic origin is the key factor determining their preference for one tense or the other, while temporal distance between the moment of utterance & the event does not play a detectable role. Compared with hodiernal time contexts, this temporal distance can be considered long. Nevertheless, the results for 'esta manana' match those obtained for other hodiernal adverbial modifiers. This means that even in the area of "standard" Peninsular Spanish, spoken outside the Astur-Leonese dialectal area & the linguistic area of Galician, the grammaticalization of the Present Perfect has not advanced at a uniform pace. Adapted from the source document