La oposición de los tiempos simples del pasado en relación con eventos bajo foco vs. eventos de soporte en algunas lenguas romances

This article deals with the simple past tenses in Spanish, French and
Portuguese. The functional hypothesis to be tested is that the preterit tense
indicates events under focus, and the imperfect past tense indicates background
events. This is done for two reasons: i) to show that this hypothesis is capable
of explaining the use of the simple past tenses in observed examples of language
use, not only in limited contexts, but also, and especially, in complete
texts; ii) to show that the opposition between the two tenses does not differ
fundamentally in the three investigated languages. Quantitative evidence is
presented to demonstrate the validity of the hypothesis, but the observed
correlations are mainly based on a qualitative relationship between the meanings
of the studied verb forms and the tested variables.