Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

Citation: Mulder, Gijs, Gert-Jan

Schoenmakers, Olaf Hoenselaar, and

Helen de Hoop. 2022. Tense and

Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work

and Its Translations. Languages 7: 217.

https://doi.org/10.3390/languages

7030217

Academic Editors: Henriëtte de

Swart and Bert Le Bruyn

Received: 1 October 2021

Accepted: 7 July 2022

Published: 12 August 2022

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral

with regard to jurisdictional claims in

published maps and institutional afﬁl-

iations.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This article is an open access article

distributed under the terms and

conditions of the Creative Commons

Attribution (CC BY) license (https://

creativecommons.org/licenses/by/

4.0/).

languages

Article

Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and

Its Translations

Gijs Mulder , Gert-Jan Schoenmakers , Olaf Hoenselaar and Helen de Hoop *

Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract:

This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across four

European languages. The corpus consists of a selection of eight chapters from Javier Marías’s Spanish

novel Así empieza lo malo ‘Thus bad begins’, and its translations to English, Dutch, and French. We

annotated 1579 verb forms in the Spanish source text for tense, and, subsequently, their translations

in the other languages, distinguishing between two registers within the novel, i.e., dialogue and

narration. We found that the vast majority of the Spanish tenses are translated one-to-one to their

counterparts in the three languages, especially in narration. In dialogue, we found several deviations,

which we could partially account for within an Optimality Theoretic approach by appealing to the

notion of markedness along two different typological dimensions, namely, tense (present versus past)

and aspect (imperfective versus perfective).

Keywords:

literary corpus; grammatical tenses; present perfect; simple past; narration; dialogue;

markedness

1. Introduction

This paper investigates how four grammatical tenses in a Spanish novel having

a ﬁrst-person narrator are translated to English, Dutch, and French. In particular, we

focus on the different distributions between present perfect and simple past, as these

may compete with each other to express past eventualities (de Swart 2007; Schaden 2009;

Van der Klis et al. 2021).

We use the Reichenbachian notions of E for eventuality, S for speech time, and R

for reference point or, perhaps more appropriately, viewpoint. Note that we use E for

eventuality rather than event, in order to include events as well as states (Bach 1986).

Reichenbach (1947) illustrates the distinction between E and R with the English sentence

Peter had gone, where R is situated between E (Peter went) and S, and has to be provided by

the context. Reichenbach (1947, p. 288) claims that, in the context of a story, “the series of

events recounted determines the point of reference” (R), and other events “lying outside this

point are then referred, not directly to the point of speech, but to

this point of reference

determined by the story

” (boldface added). In the simple past, E and R are typically

simultaneous (E,R-S), which distinguishes the simple past from the perfect. Sentences in

the present perfect, such as I have seen Charles, are “

not of a narrative type

but affect us

with the immediacy of a direct report to the reader” (boldface added) (Reichenbach 1947,

p. 289). Hence, while E is before S in the present perfect, R coincides with S: E-R,S. Clearly,

if E precedes R (E-R), it holds that the viewpoint is external, but E does not have to precede

R, since an external viewpoint is also possible for a future event (R-E). We witness the same

patterns in Spanish, as explained below.

The present perfect in Spanish (called pretérito perfecto compuesto or antepresente) is

used to express a past eventuality with continuing relevance at the present moment (E-

R,S) (Comrie 1976; Azpiazu 2013). The implied relevance of the past event to the current

situation in (1), Reichenbach’s “immediacy of a direct report to the speaker”, is determined

Languages 2022, 7, 217. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030217 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages

Languages 2022, 7, 217 2 of 23

by the context. In (1) it could be that the speaker is satisﬁed because the washing machine

is empty and the laundry will dry quickly in the sun:

(1) Pablo ha tendido la ropa en el balcón.

Pablo

have.3SG.PRS

hang.PRF the

laundry

the balcony

‘Pablo has hung the laundry on the balcony.’

Just like the English pluperfect, the Spanish pluperfect (pluscuamperfecto or anteco-

pretérito) refers to an eventuality prior to a reference point that itself is in the past, hence

E-R-S. Again, the context of the narration determines R. In (2), Pablo’s hanging out the

laundry is located earlier in time than some reference point (narrative point of view) in the

past, for example, a point when the narrator arrived at Pablo’s place.

(2) Pablo había tendido la ropa en el balcón.

Pablo

have.3SG.IMPF

hang.PRF the

laundry

the balcony

‘Pablo had hung the laundry on the balcony.’

The characterization of the English simple past as a narrative tense, in which E and R

coincide, makes it an appropriate tense to tell a story (de Swart 2007). Spanish has two past

tenses, however, the imperfect (pretérito imperfecto or copretérito) and the preterite or simple

past (pretérito indeﬁnido or pretérito simple). We assume, following Reichenbach (1947) for

French, that both past tenses in Spanish are narrative tenses in which E and R coincide and

precede S. Reichenbach (1947, p. 291) characterizes the French tenses imparfait and passé

indeﬁni (also called passé simple) as E,R-S, with the difference that the simple past refers to E

as a point in time, whereas the imperfect refers to E as an interval, the latter indicating that

“the event covers a certain stretch of time”. Rather than as a difference between E as a point

or E as an interval, we interpret the difference between the two tenses as the aspectual

difference between non-homogeneous and homogeneous eventualities, i.e., between events

and states (Bary 2009). The imperfect is used to denote states, whereas the simple past is

used to refer to events. Importantly, however, for both past tenses in Spanish, as well as in

French, the narrative point of view R coincides with E (Reichenbach 1947). The two past

tenses in Spanish are illustrated in (3) and (4).

(3) Pablo tendió la ropa en el balcón.

Pablo hang.PST the laundry on the balcony

‘Pablo hung the laundry on the balcony.’

(4) Pablo tendía la ropa en el balcón.

Pablo hang.IMPF the laundry on the balcony

‘Pablo was hanging the laundry on the balcony.’

As can be seen in the English translation of (4), the imperfect corresponds to the

progressive in English. Indeed, Reichenbach (1947, p. 290) gives the English sentence I was

seeing John the same temporal representation as the imperfect Je voyais Jean in French, i.e.,

E,R-S, with an ‘extended’ E. Because progressive aspect denotes states, it inherently shifts

events to states (Bary 2009). As such, (4) might occur in the background part of a narra-

tion, implying that Pablo was hanging the laundry on the balcony when something else

happened (Bybee 1995, p. 447). Reichenbach (1947, p. 290) notes that the “extended tenses

[such as the progressive in English and the imperfect in French] are sometimes used to

indicate, not duration of the event, but repetition”. Imperfective aspect, which corresponds

to Reichenbach’s notion of ‘extended tense’, refers to homogeneous eventualities, i.e., states,

and can be further broken down into habitual and continuous aspect (Comrie 1976).

The imperfect in Spanish thus marks past tense as well as imperfective aspect. The

progressive in English can be seen as a speciﬁc construction that marks imperfective aspect

in English, but unlike the imperfect, it is an analytical construction of which the auxiliary

indicates tense and the present participle indicates imperfective aspect. Similarly, a present

perfect construction in English, Spanish, and many other languages consists of an auxiliary

denoting tense and a past participle denoting perfective aspect.

The imperfect in Romance languages expresses past tense and imperfective aspect,

thus making explicit reference to a state in the past (Comrie 1976, p. 24; Bybee et al. 1994,

Languages 2022, 7, 217 3 of 23

p. 125). In our view, this does not imply that the simple past in Romance languages marks

perfective aspect, pace Comrie (1976, p. 18) and Bybee et al. (1994, p. 54). We follow Cipria

and Roberts (2000) and Borik and Janssen (2008), who argue that the non-homogeneous

(telic) reading of the simple past in Romance languages is not part of its meaning, whereas

the homogeneous (atelic) reading is part of the meaning of the imperfect. In accordance

with this view, we take the imperfect in Spanish and French to mark imperfective aspect,

just like a present participle in English, but we do not take the simple past to mark perfective

aspect. Instead, the Spanish and French simple past tense obtains the event reading as a

result of its co-existence with the imperfect, a past tense that marks imperfective aspect.

By contrast, the past participle, which is part of the perfect, does mark perfective aspect in

French and Spanish, just like in English.

Perfective aspect “denotes a situation viewed in its entirety” (Comrie 1976, p. 12). An

example of perfective aspect marking as opposed to imperfective zero marking in Russian

is given in (5)–(6), adopted from Wiemer and Seržant (2017, p. 245).

(5) Petja ˇcita-l roman.

Petja.NOM read-PST.3SG.M novel.ACC

‘Peter read/was reading a novel.’

(6) Petja pro-ˇcita-l roman.

Petja.NOM PFV-read-PST.3SG.M novel.ACC

‘Peter ﬁnished reading a novel.’

Although perfective aspect and past tense are marked independently of each other in

(6), there is an intuitive relation between past tense and perfective aspect. If an eventuality

(e.g., Peter reading a novel) is completed, it has come to an end, and is therefore usually

situated in the past. Languages that lack a dedicated category of tense, but do have

perfective aspect marking, e.g., Maltese Arabic and Lango, generally use the latter to refer

to the past, and sometimes to the future, but never to the present (Malchukov 2009, p. 22). In

fact, a combination of perfective aspect with present tense has been argued to be functionally

impossible, as perfective aspect imposes an external view on the eventuality, whereas present

tense locates the eventuality at the time of speech (Comrie 1976; Malchukov 2009).

If a synthetic form that combines perfective aspect and present tense is grammatically

possible at all, it gives rise to the so-called ‘present perfective paradox’ (Malchukov 2009,

2011; De Wit 2016; Koss et al. 2022), triggering a shift in interpretation, resulting, for

example, in a generic (narrative or habitual) meaning in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, or a

futurate meaning in Russian (Comrie 1976; Malchukov 2009). Malchukov, following Breu

(1994), argues that, in Bulgarian, present tense has won the competition between tense and

aspect, leading to a generic present tense reading. In this reading, E, R, and S coincide,

which is a characteristic of the present tense, but not of perfective aspect. By contrast,

perfective aspect has won the competition in Russian, leading to a futurate reading that

involves an external viewpoint to a future eventuality. In this futurate reading, E and

R do not coincide, which is in accordance with perfective aspect, but not with present

tense. Compare the imperfective present tense (zero marked) in (7) with the ‘functionally

impossible’ combination of present tense and perfective aspect in (8), a combination that

leads to a futurate reading (Malchukov 2009).

(7) On delaet.

he do.PRES.3SG

‘He does.’

(8) On s-delaet.

he PFV-do.PRES.3SG

‘He will do.’

The aim of this article is to account for the differences between Spanish, French,

English, and Dutch in their usage of the simple past and present perfect. As set out above,

the simple past marks past tense and the perfect marks perfective aspect. This is the case

in all four languages. In addition, the present perfect marks present tense, the pluperfect

marks past tense, and the imperfect (only in French and Spanish) marks both past tense

Languages 2022, 7, 217 4 of 23

and imperfective aspect. Section 2 presents what we call ‘Schaden’s puzzle’, which is the

observation that, in Spanish and English, the simple past seems to be the default tense

to refer to eventualities in the past, whereas in French and German, the present perfect

is. Section 3 will embed our solution to Schaden’s puzzle within an Optimality Theoretic

(OT) framework, resulting in a number of hypotheses, to be tested in a literary corpus

study reported in Section 4. The results of the corpus study are discussed in Section 5.

Section 6 concludes.

2. The (Un)markedness of the Present Perfect: Schaden’s Puzzle

The present perfect seems to be neither a true tense nor a true aspect marker (cf.

Reichenbach 1947; Comrie 1976; Lindstedt 2000; de Swart 2007; Schaden 2009; Ritz 2012;

Fløgstad 2016). Some consider it a tense (Bybee 1995; Brinton 1988), some an aspect marker

(Comrie 1976, p. 52), some avoid this classiﬁcation altogether (Dixon 2012, pp. 31–32),

and others, including us, consider it a combination of both (Ritz 2012). That the present

perfect is a combination of tense and aspect is reﬂected by the fact that, in most languages,

it is an analytic (periphrastic, complex) construction, consisting of an auxiliary and a past

participle (Bybee and Dahl 1989; Hengeveld 2011; Ritz 2012), as opposed to the simple

past. As pointed out above, the auxiliary provides the tense marker, which in the case of a

present perfect is present tense, whereas the participle denotes perfective aspect.

The present perfect has been characterized as an unstable category across languages. It

tends to evolve into either a ‘general past tense’, as in most Slavic languages and Southern

German dialects, or a ‘perfective past’ as in spoken French (Bybee and Dahl 1989; Lindstedt

2000; Ritz 2012). The fact that French has two past tenses, whereas German has only

one, accounts for this difference in development (Bybee and Dahl 1989). Indeed, the

development by which the present perfect takes on the function of a ‘perfective past’ over

time, called the aoristic drift, is found in the majority of the Romance languages (Harris

1982; Squartini and Bertinetto 2000; Schaden 2012; Drinka 2017; but see Azpiazu 2021 for

an alternative approach to the perfect in Romance languages). As for Spanish, in large

parts of America, the Canary Islands, and in the northwest of Spain, the present perfect

has more or less retained its original meaning E-R,S, whereas, in other parts, viz., the rest

of the Peninsula, the Andean area, and in the northwest of Argentina, the present perfect

has increasingly evolved towards the ‘perfective past’ (E,R-S). Within these zones several

different uses have been detected (Azpiazu 2013; Ariolfo 2019). Schwenter and Torres

Cacoullos (2008) and Howe (2013) show clear differences in the distribution of the present

perfect and the simple past. There are present perfect-favoring dialects (Peninsular Spanish

dialects) and simple past-favoring ones (e.g., Mexican and Argentine Spanish) (Howe

2013, pp. 55–58; Howe and Rodríguez Louro 2013, p. 50). However, in northern parts of

Argentina, a tendency opposite to the one found in Buenos Aires is observed, as here the

present perfect is preferred over the simple past. Howe (2013, pp. 54–57) shows that the

present perfect is used less in Argentinean Spanish than in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish.

Nevertheless, in the written register in Spanish, the current relevance meaning E-R,S

of the present perfect is more or less standardized, as opposed to its evolution in spoken

language (Azpiazu 2013, p. 28). A more radical process of divergence between registers

has occurred in French. In contemporary French, the simple past is mainly used in written

language registers, where it is still the standard tense for narrating a literary story. de Swart

(2007, p. 2282) argues that when the narrator of a written story uses the present perfect

instead of the literary simple past in French, as Camus did in his novel L’Étranger, this gives

the story a very different ‘ﬂavor’ and “calls up the atmosphere of letters or a diary”.

Reichenbach’s (1947) characterization of the present perfect as E-R,S, indicating an

external point of view on a past eventuality (since E and R do not coincide), can account

for several of its other features, namely its incompatibility with temporal adverbials that

denote a speciﬁc reference time R for E, and also its unsuitability as a narrative tense

(Lindstedt 2000; de Swart 2007). However, in French, German, and Dutch, the present

perfect does allow for a temporal adverbial, and it can to a certain degree be used as a

Languages 2022, 7, 217 5 of 23

narrative tense (de Swart 2007). Van der Klis et al. (2021, p. 24) show examples in which

Dutch and German translators opt for the present perfect (in accordance with the French

source text) after a temporal connective such as ensuite ‘after that’, or puis ‘then’, while in

Spanish and English a simple past is chosen:

(9) a. Tout s’est passé ensuite avec tant de précipitation, de certitude et de

naturel, que je ne me souviens plus de rien.

[French]

b. Danach

ist

alles so

überstürzt

, vorschriftsmäßig und natürlich abgelaufen,

daß ich mich an nichts mehr erinnere.

[German]

c. Daarna

alles zo snel, met zoveel zekerheid en natuurlijkheid

gegaan

dat

ik mij niets meer herinner.

[Dutch]

d. Todo pasó después con tanta precipitación, exactitud y naturalidad; que

no me acuerdo de nada.

[Spanish]

e. After that everything happened so quickly and seemed so inevitable and

natural that I don’t remember any of it anymore.

[English]

(10) a. Et puis, je lui ai dit ses vérités. [French]

b. Und dann habe ich ihr die Meinung gesagt. [German]

c. En daarna heb ik haar eens goed de waarheid gezegd. [Dutch]

d. Le dije cuatro verdades. [Spanish]

e. And then I told her a few home truths. [English]

In (9a–c) and (10a–c) the present perfect is used, whereas in (9d–e) and (10d–e) the

simple past is used. This ﬁts the observation that the present perfect can be used as a

narrative tense in French and German (Bybee and Dahl 1989; Lindstedt 2000; Schaden 2012).

Here, Dutch patterns with French and German, whereas Spanish and English do not.

That the present perfect can combine with a past-denoting temporal adverb in French,

German, and Dutch, but not in Spanish or English, is illustrated by the following examples

from Schaden (2009, p. 117) (we added the Dutch example (11c)). Note that we use the # sign

to mark the infelicity of the sentences, instead of an asterisk indicating ungrammaticality:

(11) a. Jean est arrivé hier. [French]

b. Hans ist gestern angekommen. [German]

c. Jan is gisteren aangekomen. [Dutch]

d. #Juan ha llegado ayer. [Spanish]

e. #John has arrived yesterday. [English]

de Swart (2007) argues in favor of a cross-linguistic Reichenbachian semantics E-R,S

of the present perfect, augmented with further language-speciﬁc constraints in English

and Dutch. According to her, the restrictions that the present perfect cannot combine

with a temporal adverbial that refers to the eventuality in the past, and that it cannot be

used as a narrative tense, do not stem from the Reichenbachian semantics E-R,S itself.

However, it seems somewhat counter-intuitive that the more prototypical present perfect as

in English needs additional semantic constraints, whereas the French and German present

perfects, which are considered less prototypical because they have extended their use to

a narrative past tense, would have the most prototypical core meaning without further

modiﬁcations (thanks to Dennis Joosen p.c. for pointing this out to us). Yao (2014) argues

that English is in the same historical process as French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and

that grammaticalization of the present perfect in English goes hand in hand with gradual

shifts in the nature of current relevance and co-occurring linguistic features. Similarly,

Ritz (2012) reports that in Australian English the present perfect has started to acquire the

past tense meaning E,R-S, for example in oral narratives. This extension of the present

perfect’s use comes with a frequent co-occurrence with temporal adverbials to also refer

to E. Ritz (2012, p. 21) concludes that “[w]hat is clear is that in a number of its uses, the

Australian present perfect is no longer a true perfect”, thus arriving at a similar conclusion

as Lindstedt (2000, p. 265), who states that “[w]hen a perfect can be used as a narrative

tense ( . . . ) it has ceased to be a perfect”.

Schaden (2009) argues that in English, Spanish, French, and German, the present

perfect competes with the simple past, and the outcome of the competition depends on

Languages 2022, 7, 217 6 of 23

which of these is the default past-referring tense in the language in question. In French

and German, the present perfect is the default tense, whereas in English and Spanish the

simple past is. The paradigm in (11) above shows the possibility of a default present perfect

to obtain an E,R-S use in French, German, and Dutch, but not in English or Spanish. In

(12), the opposite pattern is presented, namely the use of a default simple past in an E-R,S

context, which is a possibility in English and Spanish, but not in German, Dutch, or French

(Schaden 2009, p. 128) (again, we have added the Dutch example):

(12) [Archimedes in his bath . . . ]

a. I found it! [English]

b. ¡Lo encontré! [Spanish]

c. #Ich fand es! [German]

d. #Ik vond het! [Dutch]

e. #Je le trouvai! [French]

Based on examples such as (12a–b), Schaden (2009, p. 129) concludes that “even

though the present perfect in English or Spanish has sometimes been characterized as

being a better example of a perfect because of its dominant current-relevance character, it is

not the only way to express current relevance in these languages. In French or German,

however, in order to bring across something like ‘current-relevance’, one has no other

choice than to use the present perfect”. Schaden’s (2009) observation appears to be an

important and very robust observation. The default tense in English and Spanish is the

simple past (although this is not necessarily the case for all varieties of Spanish and English),

which can therefore not only be used in a prototypical narrative E,R-S context, but also in

a current relevance E-R,S context, as illustrated in (12). By contrast, the default tense in

French, German, and Dutch is the present perfect, which can therefore not only be used

for the prototypical E-R,S reading, but also in a narrative E,R-S context, as exempliﬁed in

(11) (although this extended use is more restricted in Dutch than in German and French, cf.

Boogaart 1999; Le Bruyn et al. 2019).

Schaden (2009) analyzes the pattern sketched above in terms of a competition between

the simple past and the present perfect, but argues that the pattern cannot be derived

from the ‘intrinsic’ markedness of the two, the reason being that the present perfect is

always the marked form, because it is the morpho-syntactically more complex form (a

periphrastic construction), whereas the current relevance meaning is the marked meaning.

Schaden (2009, p. 133) argues that the present perfect is also semantically marked because

it asymmetrically entails the simple past (if E-R,S, then E-S). The simple past is thus

compatible with more possible worlds, and is hence semantically unmarked. The unmarked

form would therefore be the simple past across languages, and the analysis would be unable

to distinguish between English and Spanish on the one hand, and German and French on

the other.

Schaden’s proposed analysis is thus based on the concept of a ‘default’ form, which,

however, cannot be the morpho-syntactically unmarked form. This notion of a default

tense form distinguishes between Spanish and English, where the default tense form is the

simple past, and German and French, where it is the present perfect. Schaden (2009) cannot

explain how the two tenses obtained their default status, as according to him it cannot

be based on either syntactic or semantic markedness. Schaden (2009, p. 133) therefore

concludes “that it is not possible to simply derive the markedness from some intrinsic

properties of the present perfect and the simple past, as one could do in the framework of

bidirectional Optimality Theory”. This is what we refer to as ‘Schaden’s puzzle’. In the next

section we propose an analysis in which the present perfect does emerge as the unmarked

form in French, German, and Dutch. This is achieved by dividing the present perfect into

its two components, the markedness of which can be measured along two dimensions,

tense and aspect. This then opens the way for an OT analysis that Schaden (2009) considers

impossible, which can explain the differences between Spanish and English on the one

hand, and French, German, and Dutch on the other.

Languages 2022, 7, 217 7 of 23

3. An Optimality Theoretic Solution to Schaden’s Puzzle

The analysis we propose is couched in the general framework of Optimality Theory.

Optimality Theory views grammar as a set of violable and potentially conﬂicting con-

straints that interact with each other (Smolensky and Legendre 2006). In OT Syntax an

input meaning is mapped onto the optimal output form expressing that meaning best,

whereas in OT Semantics an input form is unidirectionally mapped onto the optimal output

interpretation of that form. However, what is optimal from a speaker’s perspective need not

be optimal from a hearer’s perspective, and vice versa. Therefore, for the interplay between

structure and interpretation we take a bidirectional OT perspective, resulting in optimal

pairs of form and meaning (Hendriks et al. 2010). Abstracting away from the difference

between languages in having either one (English, German, Dutch) or two (Spanish, French)

past tenses, we propose two optimization patterns, one for English and Spanish, and the

other for French, German, and Dutch.

The constraints that we use in our OT analysis are deﬁned below. Cross-linguistically,

past tense is the marked form compared to present (or non-past) tense (Bybee and Dahl

1989). Perfective aspect can be the marked form compared to imperfective aspect, or it can

be the other way around. For example, Müller (2013, p. 90) presents a number of South

American languages in which perfective but not imperfective aspect is marked, a number

of languages in which it is the other way around, and a number of languages in which

both imperfective and perfective aspect are marked. From this we derive two markedness

constraints on form, *PST (avoid past tense marking) and *PFV (avoid perfective aspect

marking). These constraints may outrank their counterparts *PRS (avoid present tense

marking) and *IPFV (avoid imperfective aspect marking) or not, but crucially, these two

constraints can also be ranked with respect to each other. The third and fourth constraints

are bidirectional faithfulness constraints between meaning and form. The third constraint

links past tense marking to past eventualities, and the fourth constraint associates perfective

aspect marking to external viewpoint.

• *PFV: Avoid perfective aspect marking on the verb;

• *PST: Avoid past tense marking on the verb;

•

E-S

↔

PST: Mark past tense if and only if the eventuality precedes the time of speech;

• E-R ↔ PFV: Mark perfective aspect if and only if the viewpoint is external.

Bidirectional Optimality Theory is a framework that models simultaneous optimiza-

tion of form and meaning, thus leading to optimal form-meaning pairs, instead of just

optimal forms on the basis of input meanings, or just optimal interpretations on the basis

of input forms (Hendriks et al. 2010). When a language has two available forms for two

related interpretations, there are four form-meaning pairs that participate in the bidirec-

tional OT competition, of which two pairs will win. These winning pairs are both called

superoptimal. When a language has four related temporal meanings, E,R,S, E-R,S, E,R-S,

and E-R-S, and four related tenses, i.e., present tense, simple past, present perfect, and

pluperfect, we obtain four superoptimal pairs relating each tense to one meaning. This

is shown in Tableau 1 (constraint violations are indicated with *). Tableau 1 presents a

global analysis of the competition between these four meanings in a language with these

four tenses (present tense, simple past, present perfect, and pluperfect) on the basis of the

four constraints given above. Ranking the constraints would not alter the outcome of the

bidirectional optimization. Therefore, we leave them unranked with respect to each other.

To indicate this, the lines between the constraints are dotted instead of solid in the tableau.

The superoptimal (winning) pairs in Tableau 1 are indicated by the sign

Languages 2022, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 8 of 24

Bidirectional Optimality Theory is a framework that models simultaneous

optimization of form and meaning, thus leading to optimal form-meaning pairs, instead

of just optimal forms on the basis of input meanings, or just optimal interpretations on the

basis of input forms (Hendriks et al. 2010). When a language has two available forms for

two related interpretations, there are four form-meaning pairs that participate in the

bidirectional OT competition, of which two pairs will win. These winning pairs are both

called superoptimal. When a language has four related temporal meanings, E,R,S, E-R,S,

E,R-S, and E-R-S, and four related tenses, i.e., present tense, simple past, present perfect,

and pluperfect, we obtain four superoptimal pairs relating each tense to one meaning.

This is shown in Tableau 1 (constraint violations are indicated with *). Tableau 1 presents

a global analysis of the competition between these four meanings in a language with these

four tenses (present tense, simple past, present perfect, and pluperfect) on the basis of the

four constraints given above. Ranking the constraints would not alter the outcome of the

bidirectional optimization. Therefore, we leave them unranked with respect to each other.

To indicate this, the lines between the constraints are dotted instead of solid in the tableau.

The superoptimal (winning) pairs in Tableau 1 are indicated by the sign .

Tableau 1. Bidirectional optimization of tenses.

*PFV *PST E-S ↔ PST E-R ↔ PFV



PRS, E,R,S

PRS, E-R,S * *

PRS, E,R-S *

PRS, E-R-S * *

PST, E,R,S * *

PST, E-R,S * *



PST, E,R-S *

PST, E-R-S * *

PRF, E,R,S * *



PRF, E-R,S * *

PRF, E,R-S * * *

PRF, E-R-S * *

PLUP, E,R,S * * * *

PLUP, E-R,S * *

PLUP, E,R-S * * *



PLUP, E-R-S * *

Tableau 1 shows that the first superoptimal pair is the pair that associates present

tense to the E,R,S meaning, because this form-meaning pair does not violate any of the

four constraints. This superoptimal pair blocks all other pairs with E,R,S as a meaning,

and all other pairs with PRS as a form. The second round of bidirectional optimization

results in the superoptimal pair that links the simple past to the meaning E,R-S, as this

pair only violates the markedness constraint that penalizes past tense marking (*PST). The

third and fourth superoptimal pairs combine the present perfect with the meaning E-R,S

(violating one markedness and one faithfulness constraint), and the pluperfect with the

meaning E-R-S, violating the two markedness constraints, but satisfying the two

faithfulness constraints.

Note that, irrespective of the ranking between the two markedness constraints *PFV

and *PST, bidirectional optimization results in three superoptimal pairs of form and

meaning for reference to eventualities in the past, indicated by the sign  in Tableau 1.

This accounts for the fact that, in the languages under consideration in this article, the core

meanings of simple past and present perfect are E,R-S and E-R,S respectively, whereas the

pluperfect is linked to E-R-S. Although this is a welcome result, bidirectional optimization

Tableau 1 shows that the ﬁrst superoptimal pair is the pair that associates present

tense to the E,R,S meaning, because this form-meaning pair does not violate any of the four

constraints. This superoptimal pair blocks all other pairs with E,R,S as a meaning, and all

other pairs with PRS as a form. The second round of bidirectional optimization results in the

superoptimal pair that links the simple past to the meaning E,R-S, as this pair only violates

the markedness constraint that penalizes past tense marking (*PST). The third and fourth

superoptimal pairs combine the present perfect with the meaning E-R,S (violating one

Languages 2022, 7, 217 8 of 23

markedness and one faithfulness constraint), and the pluperfect with the meaning E-R-S,

violating the two markedness constraints, but satisfying the two faithfulness constraints.