Aspectual Interpretation in Spanish of Adverb-Modified Verbal Forms (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lexical aspect in Spanish: contrasts, syntactic structures and semantic interpretations
Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics
The different distinctions related to lexical aspect –state, activity, accomplishments and achievements– play an important role in the grammar of Spanish, but many of the details about how these distinctions can be implemented are unclear: which features distinguish between the classes, how the classes relate to each other, what is the nature of telicity or dynamicity and how one can account for the alternations that a verb is subject to involving its aspect are some of the most important problems from this perspective. The goal of this article is to provide a sufficient empirical base to address these questions and present the current alternatives to answer them.
A binary approach to Spanish tense and aspect: on the tense battle about the past
Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2017
The present paper aims at accounting for the Spanish Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto and the Indefinido by applying three binary tense oppositions: Present vs Past, Synchronous vs Posterior and Imperfect(ive) vs Perfect(ive). For the sixteen Spanish tense forms under analysis a binary approach leads to covering twelve of them. Their relation with the preterital forms outside the range of the three oppositions is accounted for by two surgical operations: (a) the notion of Imperfect(ive) is severed from the notion of ongoing progress by restricting it to underinformation about completion and by seeing continuous tense forms as involving a more complex semantics; (b) the notion of (non-)stative is strictly severed from interference of information coming from the arguments of a verb. These theoretical moves make the way free for a formal-semantic insight into the interaction of Spanish tense and aspect. It also paves the way for a principled distinction between completion and ant...
On Certain Light Verbs in Spanish: The Case of Temporal Tener and Llevar
Syntax, 2009
In this paper we analyze the behavior of some temporal constructions in two varieties of Spanish: those with the verb llevar Ôto carryÕ, used in the standard variety, and those with tener Ôto haveÕ, which are characteristic of some American dialects. Our purpose is twofold: on the one hand, we try to account for the argument structure of these constructions, and on the other, we seek to give an analysis of the aspectual restrictions they show. These restrictions will be related to the fact that both verbs are light verbs incorporating an abstract preposition, allative in the case of llevar and of central coincidence in the case of tener. The paper constitutes a further application of Hale and KeyserÕs framework to a new set of data. Some related constructions involving movement verbs will be described and discussed as well. We are deeply indebted to Esthela Treviño and Calixto Aguero Bautista for helping us with the date. We also thank M. Carme Picallo and Violeta Demonte for their comments, suggestions, and support. We also thank the audiences of the workshops in which various of this paper were presented. The research behind this work has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Technología and FEDER to two research projects: BEF2003-0605 and HUM2006-13295-02-01 and also by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2005SGR-00753).
2008
Tense relates an event to a specific point in time, usually the moment of speech, and includes categories such as past, present, and future (Comrie 1985). Aspect, on the other hand, involves "different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation" (Comrie 1976:3) and includes oppositions such as perfective versus imperfective and progressive versus non-progressive. The perfective/imperfective distinction has been characterized in various ways, including viewing a situation as a unified whole (perfective) versus taking into account its internal structure (imperfective) (Comrie 1976), representing the time interval over which the situation occurs as closed or bounded (perfective) versus open or unbounded (imperfective) (González 1998, Montrul & Slabakova 2002), or highlighting the situation's termination (perfective) versus its duration (imperfective) (King & Suñer 2008). Comrie (1976) views progressive aspect as a subcategory of imperfective aspect. He first makes the distinction within imperfectivity between habitual and continuous aspect, and then further subdivides continuousness into progressive and non-progressive manifestations, with the latter corresponding to stative verbs (Comrie 1976:25). Thus, within imperfectivity, non-progressive aspect can refer to either continuous states or habitual actions. As is the case with many languages, Spanish verbal morphology marks both temporal and aspectual distinctions. Of interest to the present paper is how Spanish combines the aspectual distinctions discussed above with past temporal reference, and how this compares with corresponding forms in English. First of all, Spanish has two simple past tenses, the preterite and the imperfect, which encode perfective and imperfective aspect, respectively. In contrast, English has only one simple past tense. An example of the Spanish verb leer 'to read' in the preterite is given in (1) below, while (2) illustrates the sam English verb. (1) Marisol leyó el libro Cien años de soledad. (2) Marisol leía el libro Cien años de soledad. (3) Marisol read the book One Hundred Years of Solitude. The English simple past in (3) is analogous to the Spanish preterite in (1) above, with its default aspectual interpretation being perfective, while the Spanish imperfect in (2) lacks a corresponding * The author would like to thank J. Clancy Clements, César-Félix-Brasdefer, Kimberly Geeslin, Jason Killam, and two anonymous reviewers for the HLS 2006 Proceedings for their assistance with various aspects of this research project including the design and carrying out of the study and helpful comments on earlier drafts. All errors remain my own.
A corpus-based study of aspect: still and already + verb phrase constructions into Spanish1
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2015
This paper explores still and already + verb phrase constructions, their semantics, and the resources Spanish uses to convey their meanings. The aim is to explore some of the ways in which the grammars of the two languages, English and Spanish, encode aspectual transitions. The contrastive procedure is based on the parallel corpus P-ACTRES, and combines qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis: the English→Spanish equivalences are qualitatively identified and their relevance is assessed quantitatively. The similarities and differences are analyzed and used as a basis to formulate some empirically-grounded (although necessarily partial) considerations on cross-linguistic lexis-grammar relations. The results also raise questions about contrast and grammaticalization across the languages. 1 Research for this article, undertaken as part of the ACTRES program, has been partly funded by the Regional Government of Castile and León [LE227U13]. The acronym stands for Análisis contrastivo y traducción English-Spanish "Contrastive analysis and translation English-Spanish". For updated information on results and findings see http://actres.unileon.es/ [Accessed 27 December 2013].
Stative/eventive alternations in Spanish
2018
This chapter focuses on the stative/eventive alternation in Spanish with the purpose of providing evidence to support the following ideas: the heterogeneity of the states as an aspectual class, the existence of verbs and verbal predicates which are neutral with respect to the criterion of dynamicity and the necessity to single out different levels of aspectual analysis, from lexical to discourse level. In order to prove these ideas, I will analyse a small but varied series of examples showing the above-mentioned alternation. In particular, I will examine the semantic-aspectual characteristics of the Spanish verbs such as atravesar ‘to cross’ (atravesar ‘to cross’, rodear ‘to surround’, cubrir ‘to cover’, etc.), which are used in both stative and eventive contexts; comparative progressives of the type estar cada vez más guapa ‘to look more and more beautiful’, which denote a gradual change despite being based on the stative predicate; the predicates of activity used in the characteri...
Apenas: aspectual reduction and subjetive evaluation in Spanish
Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 2014
This paper explores both the polysemy and the development of the adverb apenas 'barely hardly' into a discourse marker of temporal proximity 'just/recently' . In contrast to well-known expected tendencies in grammaticalization, apenas runs against the cannon. The subjective adverb apenas, that designates events carried out "with effort/difficulty", changed into an objective connector signaling immediacy among events or proximity to the time of speech. The polysemy of apenas is accounted for both synchronically and diachronically, as the interaction between the force-dynamics configuration of the marker and the aspectual configuration of the verb. It is proposed that aspect determines the degree of subjectivity of the event where telicity triggers objective representations and these, in turn, led the way for the emergence of a discourse marker of temporal proximity.
Aspectual Verbs in European and Brazilian Portuguese
Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2004
This paper is about the semantics and the syntax of aspectual verbs in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Some of these verbs select a+Infinitive in the European variety whereas the same verbs select that structure and Gerund in the Brazilian variety. We show that this discrepancy can be explained in semantic and syntactic grounds due to the different nature of the semantic 'input' (stative or eventive), the availability of tense constructions and the functional structure of the embedded domain. Another group of aspectual verbs do not differ in their syntactic structure in the two varieties as their structure (de+Infinitive) is the same, although syntactically different from a+ Infinitive, but they do differ in their semantics and also in the selection of different verbs.