Preterit and Perfect in Romance: New Insights from Occitan

International audienceLike other Romance languages, Occitan can, at first sight, use different verb forms to report a past event. We will focus in this paper on two paradigms presenting a formal opposition—a simple structure, as in (1), vs. a complex structure as in (2), which in grammars or textbooks are often called preterit and perfect respectively: (1) Joan arribèt a Tolosa (Joan arrived in Toulouse), (2) Joan es arribat a Tolosa (Joan has arrived in Toulouse). From a semantic point of view, these two paradigms are often described along a perfective (or aorist) vs. resultative opposition, in fact pertaining to tense and aspect categories. Our aim is to describe the semantic properties and functions of each paradigm and their use in oral and written data for one dialect of Occitan,the Lengadocian dialect