In this dissertation I explore the meaning of the perfect construction tener ‘have’ (present indicative) + (non agreeing) past participle as used in the Spanish spoken in Galicia (northwest region of Spain), to which I refer as GaSP (Galician Spanish Perfect). The goal is to develop a formal analysis that captures the empirical findings of the meanings of Galician Spanish utterances with this construction.
First, temporal reference in GaSP utterances is constrained to reference time intervals that include the time of utterance in their denotation and whose length is equal or greater than (roughly) two days stretching from the day of utterance time into the past. Second, GaSP utterances express plural eventualities temporally distributed at discontinuous intervals across the reference time interval. And third, in contrast to the so-called prototypical perfects, the range of interpretations of GaSP utterances is very limited, exhibiting universal and existential readings with multiple events.
I formally analyze the empirical findings within the Reichenbachian framework of temporality. I specifically capture the temporal relations between the times involved in tense and aspect in Klein’s (1994) theory of temporal interpretation. Tense determines the relation between the time of utterance and the reference time whereas grammatical aspect determines the relation between the reference time and the eventuality time. The meanings of event plurality and temporal distribution of events are explained in terms of Deo (2009) and Deo and Piñango’s (2010) theory of quantificational distributivity through interval partitions.