Statistics on Morphological Irregularity in Spanish Verb Tenses

tense seems to be at the heart of the terminological problem. The fundamental value, the essential meaning, of a verb tense is specified as the value that characterizes invariably all of its uses, regardless of whether those uses are absolute or relative, main or secondary, fixed or variable, etc. The name of each tense must reflect exclusively that unifying fundamental value. The unifying fundamental value that characterizes the cardinal tense is the lack of semantic restrictions (together with an absence of formal markers); the unsubstitutible, inalterable, essential value of the perfect and the imperfect is aspect. Although the essential meaning of these forms has nothing to do with past or present time, their official names continue to perpetuate false notions about their nature and that of the Spanish verb system. The dual or multiple values exhibited by the future, the conditional, and some of the compound tenses do not point the way out of terminological difficulties. New insights and possible solutions await us, I believe, in the study of the substitutions that are possible for each verb tense and in linguistic analyses at a level more comprehensive than that of the sentence

Epistemology · Future tense · Grammar · Imperfect · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Nothing · Past tense · Present perfect · Present tense · Sentence · Statistics · Value (mathematics) · Verb · Lexicography and Language Studies · linguistics and terminology studies · Mathematics · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies