Il tempo verbale ed il tempo fisico trascorso dalla prospettiva del grado di rilevanza dell’evento passato per il momento dell’enunciazione: studio empirico su dodici verbi d’azione in testi di ricerca

Abstract

This study focuses on the use of two tenses, the passato prossimo (PP) and the passato remoto (PR), in a particular research setting: the in-text citations of diverse scientific texts in relation to the temporal distance between the year of publication of the source cited and that of the text itself.
Traditionally, the literature assigns these tenses the function of referring to recent events and/or events relevant at the present moment (PP) and to distant situations with no current relevance (PR). In addition, the Italian language shows the expansion of the lapse of time considered adequate for the use of the PP towards events that took place in a more distant past, and, finally, diatopic variation, with speakers from some areas of the Peninsula tending to expand this lapse even further and to consider the use of the PP correct even when referring to very distant past events.
Based on these premises, through the results of this analysis, we firstly empirically demonstrate the importance of the lapse of time, in terms of years, between the event (in this case, the publication of the text referred to) and the moment of enunciation (or, the text being written) for the choice of both tenses. Secondly, the results show the use of the PP in references to temporally distant situations and, at the same time, the complete absence of the PR in references to the year of publication of the text itself. In conclusion, we demonstrate the close relationship between the present relevance perceived by the authors and the physical time between the scientific work and the cited source.