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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 177–208

(And yet) another proposal for ser/estar

| National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)

This paper puts forward an l-syntactic account of non-trivially alternating copulas ser/estar building on incorporation of a prepositional head (p*). I propose that p* is to be seen as a locus of encoding and variation of the relevant properties whereby ser/estar diverge, but also as the element constraining selection and interpretation of the predicate.

First, I use the distinction between telicity and boundedness as a starting point for developing a reformulation of the Hale-and-Keyserian analysis of ser/estar that supports a new typology of p heads within the Central Coincidence domain. This is important to capture wider sets of corpus and analytic data, but also in order to reflect an adequate division of work between verbal (Aktionsart) and constructional aspect. Then, I propose a novel implementation based on p-conflation and Hyponym Argument Relations. If correct, the analysis handles different facts and at the same time positions ser/estar into a much ampler frame.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The semantic (aspectual) problem
    • 2.1TC and telicity
    • 2.2 Estar as a telic copula
    • 2.3 Estar as a TC
  • 3.A way out: boundedness vs. telicity
  • 4.Implementation
    • 4.1Staying within CCs
    • 4.2On the semantics of p*: pAT and pHAVE
    • 4.3On the syntax of p*
  • 5.A Hale-and-Keyserian solution
  • 6.In sum
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.12ras
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