摘要：The article deals with the choice of aoristic past tenses (he cantat; cantí; vaig cantar) in Catalan/Valencian by two groups of bilingual speakers, native in Catalan/Valencian or Spanish. The data was gathered by means of elicitation tests, carried out among a total of 109 informants from Catalonia and Castellón (Valencia).
The results show that native speakers of Catalan stick to the norm as defined by different grammars of the language, while native speakers of Spanish present more variation. However, considering the great differences between Spanish and Catalan in the use of past tenses, divergences from the norm must be regarded as relatively slight, occurring more frequently among native speakers of Spanish from Valencia than among those from Catalonia. The results suggest that native speakers of Spanish from Valencia tend to use more frequently the simple perfect (cantí) -- a tense used in spoken language only in a few localities in the Catalan/Valencian/ Balear-speaking areas -- when the temporal distance between the moment of utterance and the event increases, which can be attributed to influence from Spanish.
