On the issue of past tenses in Portuguese and Spanish: a constrastive study based on a selected work

In our thesis entitled On the Issue of Past Tenses in Spanish and Portuguese: Constrastive Study Based on a Selected Work we have compared the past tense system in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese, in order to discover main differences on the temporal as well as on the extratemporal level. In general, the complexness of the repertory of past tenses in Romance languages makes the full comprehension of the problem by not native speaker extremely difficult. Moreover, the linguistic proximity of both languages can cause many interferences and the phenomenon called "false friends". In the first "theoretical" part we have observed the principal theories of the most significant linguists and tried to demonstrate their statements on an authentic linguistic material. We have discovered many secondary meanings at every paradigm, which implicates difficulties during the study or translation. As we expected the essential difference on the temporary level consists in the use of perfeito composto in Portuguese and perfecto compuesto in Spanish, which also have different aspectual characteristics. On the other hand, most secondary (mainly modal) values are in both languages represented by imperfeito / imperfecto. In case of mais-que-perfeito / pluscuamperfecto there is an asymmetrical relation between the morphological..