Verb as space

Six new Spanish grammar themes

Abstract

The consideration of time as the basic and defining meaning of the verb keeps the description of the use of the verbal system bogged down in a set of rules of thumb that must be constantly clarified and contradicted by a multitude of unexplained non-temporal uses, which are presented as “exceptional”, "dislocated" or even “incorrect”. This situation, clearly pre-scientific from a theoretical point of view, is especially harmful in the field of teaching. Here students are faced with a tangle of uses without a unitary sense that allows to apply logic to their understanding and use. The present article starts with the rejection of time as an operational value of the Spanish verb (Ruiz 2014) to explore the didactic possibilities and implications of a spatial definition. Under this conception, the rote learning required by the time reference rule-of-thumb can be replaced by a logical understanding of the system as a system and its possibilities of use. This is a logic that leads, furthermore, to the possibility of defining "themes" of grammar that have never been present in our syllabi.