”The Use of the Present Perfect with Aoristic Value in the Speech of Latin American Students”

The chapter studies a specific characteristic of the speech of Latin American students residing in Genoa: use of the past simple or compound verb forms. The author examines the results of a corpus of semi-directed interviews, taking into account its characteristics, the syntactic environment in which it is used, combinations with other verb forms, adverbial complements, temporal expressions, the deixis and its communicative context. According to the author, the speaker’s discourse strategies and the desire to converge with or diverge from the local language (Italian) are involved in the selection of one variant or another.