The Political Past Project. Temporal and spatial dimensions of the grammar used in Latin American political discourse.

In this project we plan to carry out a detailed analysis of some of the linguistic features of the use of the past tenses in the oral speech of well-known Latin American leaders during different public declarations and discourses. The aim of this study is to describe the different uses of the Spanish past tenses, and more precisely the use of the present perfect (pretérito perfecto compuesto), a temporal structure not very common in Latin American varieties of Spanish, its causes and its meanings, taking into consideration grammatical variation, pragmatics and the intentions of the speaker.