This dissertation presents a view of the Spanish imperfect grounded on that of the grammarian Andres Bello, which leads to an explanation of a series of phenomena related to this tense noted by linguists of the past three decades.
The author proposes a syntactic structure for the imperfect which accounts for various questions concerning its meaning. She deals with the difference between the simultaneous and the shifted readings of verbal complement sentences in past tenses. The former reading is due to an in situ interpretation of the subordinate imperfect clause, whose Tense Phrase is coindexed with an element of the subordinating clause. The shifted reading of verbal complement clauses in past tenses is restricted to those cases in which the clause undergoes presuppositional raising to the main clause, from where it will have accesss to the Speech Time as a reference time. In the last part the dissertation compares the structure of the imperfect to that of another imperfective tense-aspect complex, the progressive.
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