Published in New Approaches in the Research on the Crown of Aragon

Keywords: Catalan, Historical Grammar, Semantics, Syntax, Verbal Tense.

The analysis of verbal tenses is a well-studied topic in Romance Languages, for which there are excellent studies and monographs in what pertains to the Catalan language. In this article we offer an overview of this topic based on an analysis of several electronic corpora developed within the Institute ISIC-IVITRA or with its participation, such as: the Electronic Corpus of Old Catalan (Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic [CICA]), the Metacorpus(that is the Electronic Multilingual Corpus of Old and Contemporary Texts, Corpus Informatitzat Multilingüe de Textos Antics i Contemporanis [CIMTAC]), and the Electronic Corpus for the Old Catalan Grammar (Corpus Informatitzat per a la Gramàtica del Català Antic [CIGCA]). We study the forms of the verb cantara from the first examples of its use in the 12th century to the end of the 16th century. Our intention is to identify their main values, describe the progressive development, and determine how and when these forms assumed the typical syntantic functions associated with the imperfect subjunctive that are typical of Castilian and of many of the Valencian varieties of the Catalan language.