The chapter studies a specific characteristic of the speech of Latin
American students residing in Genoa: use of the past simple or compound verb forms. The author
examines the results of a corpus of semi-directed interviews, taking into account its characteristics,
the syntactic environment in which it is used, combinations with other verb forms, adverbial
complements, temporal expressions, the deixis and its communicative context. According to the
author, the speaker’s discourse strategies and the desire to converge with or diverge from the local
language (Italian) are involved in the selection of one variant or another.
