Intersections between grammatical and lexical aspects underlying compound past

The aim of this study is to contribute to comparative studies among Romance languages in relation to the description of temporal-aspectual properties. Specifically, we intend to investigate the aspectual properties of compound past (ter/essere or avere + participle), with the auxiliary verb in the present, in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and in Italian spoken in Northern Italy (INI), comparing both languages, considering intersections between grammatical and lexical aspectual information. We assume the hypothesis that both BP and INI share aspectual properties expressed by compound past. Based on data of both languages, we verified that, in BP, compound past expresses necessarily the universal perfect aspect due to the presence of the feature [+continuity], whereas, in INI, this periphrasis may express such aspect only in specific morphosyntactic contexts, as when associated with the adverb “finora” (“until now”) and episodic predicates. Therefore, compound past in INI, when it shows the [-continuity] feature, may express existential perfect or perfective aspects, depending, respectively, on the positive or negative specification of the [resultativity] feature. Although there are significant differences in the aspectual behavior of compound past in both romance languages, the hypothesis was confirmed, based on the proposal that the feature [-homogeneous] seems to be a condition to the expression of universal perfect by the compound past in BP and in INI in stative predicates.