La terminologia lingüística en les gramàtiques catalanes del 1891 al 1933: el temps i l'aspecte

Abstract

This paper compares the treatment of tense and aspect in 26 prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical Catalan grammars published between 1891 and 1933. The research primarily shows that the very different objectives of descriptive and pedagogical grammars mean that the former define detailed and more specialized concepts than the latter. At the same time, the authors of the prescriptively oriented grammars sometimes take contradicting positions, which can be explained by the lack of a systematic distinction between the spread of prescriptive models on the one hand and the description of the formal diversity of language on the other.

In addition, it is shown that the concept of aspect, which from the 1920s onwards is mostly regarded as a variable independent of tense (a fact which is also known to some Catalan authors) is mostly neglected and what dominates is a generally purely tense-based description of the verbal system, which also includes categories that we now clearly see as being aspectual. A temporal situation in relation to the moment of speech is usually assumed (past, present, future). The use of the concept (but not the expression) of "hodiernality", however, which appears for the first time in Par (1923), can be described as innovative.