Uso evidencial del perfecto compuesto en el español de Ecuador

Resumen

For several years now it has been claimed that there is an evidential use of the Perfect in certain Spanish-American varieties, especially those in contact with Quechua. Given the dispersion of the data and the lack of coherence in their presentation, in this paper the cases argued are analyzed from a more global perspective, taking into account the phenomena of subjectivization and modalization inherent to the Perfect in all varieties of Spanish. We will focus on some specific testimonies collected in Ecuador that certainly seem to deviate from the expected use for the Perfect in other varieties and we propose an explanation that combines the special temporal nature of the Perfect with the theory of the temporal dislocation by Rojo (1974). Thus, we seek to understand the phenomenon from the inherent properties of the Perfect in Spanish, although we do not reject the possibility of external factors influencing it, such as contact with Quechua, something that has yet to be demonstrated with more data. The need for in-depth studies of the phenomenon based on more extensive speech corpus than those currently available for Ecuadorian Spanish is ultimately claimed in the paper.