Affiliation:
1. Departamento de Lengua Española y Teoría de la Literatura, Universidad Complutense de Madrid , Madrid , 28040 , Spain
Abstract
Abstract
This article studies how Romance languages encode the individual-level (IL)/stage-level (SL) aspectual distinction in the domain of non-verbal predication. To this end, attributive copular clauses are considered, and those languages that mark the IL/SL paradigm by means of two different copulas (ser and estar ‘to be’, such as Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese) are compared with mono-copular languages (such as French, Italian, and Romanian). On the basis of recent developments in the study of the IL/SL contrast and Spanish copulas, I propose that SL-ness is encoded in non-verbal SL-predicates as an uninterpretable instance of a [Stage] feature and that SL-copular sentences are derived by virtue of an agreement operation between the predicate and an Asp head that carries an interpretable instance of [Stage], which is realised as estar in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. The conclusion is that the inventory of aspectual elements is the same across Romance languages, which differ one from another with respect to the presence of an SL-copula (namely, estar).
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference131 articles.
1. Aguilar-Sánchez, J. 2012. “Formal instruction and language contact in language variation: The case of ser and estar + adjective in the Spanishes of Limón, Costa Rica.” In Proceedings of the 14th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 9–25. Cascadilla Proceeding Project.
2. Alfaraz, G. G. 2015. “The status of the extension of estar.” Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 5(1), 3–25.
3. Arche, María Jesús. 2006. Individuals in time: Tense, aspect and the individual/stage distinction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
4. Arche, María Jesús. 2011. “Las oraciones copulativas agentivas.” In 60 problemas de gramática, edited by Escandell, María Victoria, Manuel Leonetti and Cristina Sánchez López, p. 99–105. Madrid: Akal.
5. Arche, María Jesús. 2012. “On the aspectuality of the individual-level/stage-level dichotomy.” Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 1(2), 109–31.