In this paper, we analyze the patterns of appearance of Simple and Imperfect indicative past in Spanish language users (B2) whose mother tongue is Croatian, in the formal context of learning (study of Spanish language and literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb). The aim of the research was to identify interlingual specificities in the use of predications with verbs in Simple and Imperfect Past, as well as to determine the basic patterns of their occurrence within sequential and non-sequential units of narrative text, in interaction with their lexicalaspectual properties. We compare interlingual data with relevant structures in Spanish and Croatian. It has been shown that, unlike Spanish, in interlingual texts Imperfect Past tense is used for denoting episodic durative events and states, in the sequential context, which means that the Imperfect encodes dominantly lexicalaspectual properties, primarily durativity (telicity is neutral). Among the “errors” in a nonsequential context, Imperfect Past also dominates in bounded units such as the initial summary and the final evaluative commentary of the text (usually with states verbs) or in other units where the property of completeness is not recognized – also in this case the durativity is prototypically related to Imperfect Past form. These patterns can be related to the properties of Croatian, i.e. language transfer as a factor in the formation of interlingual grammar.

En este trabajo, analizamos los patrones de ocurrencia del pretérito indefinido y el pretérito imperfecto de indicativo en los aprendices de español (B2) cuya lengua materna es el croata, en un contexto formal del aprendizaje. El objetivo de la investigación es identificar especificidades interlingüísticas en el uso de los predicados que contienen verbos en pretérito indefinido e imperfecto en la construcción de textos narrativos. En otras palabras, pretendemos determinar cómo se realizan la forma y el contenido de los “errores” en la producción interlingüística con respecto a si ocurren dentro de las unidades secuenciales o no secuenciales del texto narrativo, en interacción con sus propiedades lexicoaspectuales. A continuación, los datos se comparan con las estructuras correspondientes de la lengua objeto, el español, y de la lengua nativa, el croata, lo que nos proporciona las bases para reflexionar sobre transferencia como un factor en la formación de la gramática interlingüística.