Testo e aspetto: passato prossimo e passato remoto nei Confessionali siciliani antichi

The Old Sicilian Confessionali are devotional texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with a very simple textual structure. In particular, two of them, to a large extent, are lists of questions aimed at investigating the sinner and his sins. Nevertheless they prove to be a useful field to define the values of the “passato prossimo” and the “passato remoto”. In the two texts, the two tenses have a clearly distinct distribution. The former has a perfective value, the latter has an aoristic value and, regardless of a temporal criterion, they occur according to this aspectual opposition.