"The day they were going to kill him." Verbal periphrases in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Abstract

The article examines the values and behaviours of verbal periphrases in the novel by Gabriel García Márquez Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold). The first part analyses the main syntactic-semantic characteristics of these periphrastic constructions according to their aspectual, temporal and contextual values. The second part is devoted to the presentation of the structure of the novel, its location in time and space and the narrators and protagonists. The third part is an analysis of verbal periphrases in the novel by García Márquez which aims at demonstrating the important role of these periphrastic structures in the configuration of the novel. The first sentence contains the verbal periphrasis iban a matar which is significant for the further development of events.