“Hace como… tendrá medio año”. Análisis de las construcciones temporales impersonales con los verbos hacer y tener en el español de México

Abstract

Previous work on impersonal temporal constructions in peninsular Spanish (Howe, 2011), reveals evidence of late-stage syntactic and semantic leveling and specialization. Despite the multitude of studies into these constructions, little is known about their current usage in different dialects of Spanish. Our research offers a descriptive and variationist analysis of the impersonal temporal constructions with the verbs hacer and tener using oral data from Mexican Spanish. Our results suggest that the temporal construction with hacer is currently undergoing a transition into a fixed adverbial deictic expression, with the reference point being the moment of speech, due to the erosion of the last vestiges of its verbal origin. We propose that the appearance of the verb tener in a similar impersonal temporal construction has accelerated the loss of the verbal properties of the temporal construction with hacer.