Tense and Aspect in a Spanish Literary Work and Its Translations

This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across European languages. The consists selection eight chapters from Javier Marías’s Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo ‘Thus bad begins’, and its translations to English, Dutch, French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the source text for tense, and, subsequently, their other languages, distinguishing between two registers within novel, i.e., dialogue narration. found that vast majority are translated one-to-one counterparts three especially In dialogue, we several deviations, which could partially account an Optimality Theoretic approach by appealing notion markedness along different typological dimensions, namely, tense (present versus past) aspect (imperfective perfective).