La gramatización de CANTÉ/CANTABA para la enseñanza de ELE a anglohablantes: 1800-1900

Abstract

This article examines and evaluates the treatment of the CANTÉ/CANTABA tense pair in a corpus of 36 Spanish language grammars published between 1800 and 1900 and addressed to English speakers. Once the terminology used to specify both tenses is collected, some keys are revealed to interpret the relationship between such terms and the concepts they refer to. In addition, the values detected by the grammarians in each verb form are isolated (and presented in chronological order as they are grammatized). These values are particularly rich for the CANTABA form, which the English language «lacks». Lastly, we highlight those authors that take an additional didactic-descriptive step and place these two tenses in direct opposition: Mc Henry, Cubí, Del Mar, Monsanto and Languellier, and Ramsey.