Spanish adjectival passives with a progressive reading (original) (raw)

Origins and development of adjectival passives in Spanish. A corpus study

New Perspectives on the Study of Ser and Estar, ed. by Pérez-Jiménez, Isabel, Manuel Leonetti and Silvia Gumiel-Molina (eds.) , 2015

To date, it has generally been assumed that most contemporary uses of Spanish estar ‘be.loc’ arose some time after the use of ser ‘be’, and that the former eventually took over most uses of the latter. Previous analyses of diachronic change in estar claim that the usage of this verb became generalized as a result of some reanalysis or grammaticalization change, presumably taking over the result state and locative uses of ser. In this paper we wish to go one step further and investigate the questions of how adjectival passive estar + participle emerged in Spanish and how it extended its usage at the expense of ser based on an empirical analysis of data coming from a large corpus of Spanish texts from the 12th to the 20th century. We propose that the first and most frequent uses of estar determined the way the participial construction emerged and further extended itself, gradually usurping uses of ser, and that the language change mechanism which drove this development was analogy. More specifically, we argue that this development was driven by the analogical relations established between participles appearing with this verb and locative prepositional phrases.

On non-dynamic eventive verbs in Spanish

One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to identify, describe and analyse the lexical aspect classes allowed in natural language. Recent developments in this issue (Maienborn) have raised two interrelated questions: how many event classes there are and how they are derived from a minimum of primitives. In this article we identify a class of predicates denoting the maintenance of a situation through which 13 tests can be shown to display mixed properties between states and activities, challenging the existing taxonomies of aspectual classes. We furthermore argue that the existence of this class is expected by any theory that treats aspectual classes as epiphenomena of the combination of a restricted set of primitives, and propose an analysis where they contain a central coincidence preposition selected by an eventive layer.

Spanish participios activos are adjectival antipassives

The Linguistic Review, 2017

n many languages a set of adjectives are characterized by their “past/passive” participial morphology. Lexicalist and syntactic approaches to word formation converge on the claim that such adjectives can be derived from verbal inputs with no external argument but never from verbal inputs with an external argument. That is, there are “adjectival passives” but no “adjectival antipassives” marked with the same morphology. I argue that a sub-class of adjectives marked with the “past/passive” participial morpheme

GIBERT & MARIN (2024) Unexpected adjectival passives

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), 2024

It is commonly assumed that the requirement for an adjectival passive to be possible is a verb with a stative component in its event structure. This allows both telic and stative verbs to be part of these constructions, but leaves (atelic and dynamic) activities out. Crucially, this paper identifies a group of verbs, those of the type of perseguir 'to chase', which, despite encoding activities (and hence apparently lacking a stative component), can enter adjectival passives with estar in Spanish, even though these adjectival passives have a progressive reading. A formal syntactic analysis for the availability of these constructions is provided which preserves the above-mentioned restriction (namely, that only verbs including a stative layer are allowed in adjectival passives) and, in addition, accounts for their progressive denotation.

Tracing the development of Spanish participial constructions: An empirical study of semantic change

2012

The main aim of this thesis is to trace the development of four different constructions involving auxiliaries and participles through the history of the Spanish language. These constructions are the perfect construction expressed by haber 'have'+ past participle (PTCP), the verbal passive expressed by ser 'be'+ PTCP, the adjectival passive expressed by estar 'be. LOC'+ PTCP and the stative possessive expressed by tener 'tener. POSS'+ PTCP. Specifically, in this thesis I explore changes in the interpretations of these periphrases, ...

2022. The interaction of motion event (sub)components in Spanish motion verbs

Spanish, as a Romance language, can be considered a verb-framed language in Talmy's (1985, 1991) framework or a head path-coding language in Matsumoto's (2003, 2020, this volume) terminology. This means that the information related to the Path of motion is usually encoded in the main verb. Following Talmy's (2000) framework, the semantic component of Path covers three subcomponents: Vector that includes different types of trajectories-source, goals, etc., Conformation or the shape or geometric complex of Path, and Deictic or the motion to/from speaker and addressee). These subcomponents are illustrated in examples (1-3) respectively. (1) Vector El chico entra en la tienda Lit. 'The boy enters in the shop' (2) Conformation El chico rodea la casa Lit. 'The boy goes.around the house' (3) Deixis El chico viene del colegio Lit. 'The boy comes of-the school' Other authors, however, argue that these subcomponents may be worth analyzing separately given their own role in the configuration of the motion event in some languages. Deixis is such an element. Matsumoto (this volume) summarises some of the reasons why Deixis should be considered a different semantic component. First, it is always lexicalised even in languages with poor path verb repertoires. Second, it often has its own independent morphosyntactic slot (e.g. certain position in a serial verb, specific affix, etc.). Third, the use of Path and Deixis across languages does not always correlate; that is, when comparing two languages, for example, they might behave similarly with respect to Path but they might not do so in the case of Deixis, or vice versa 1. As far as Spanish is concerned, Deixis does not have a special encoding slot different from any of the slots or resources available to codify information about other semantic components. In other words, Deixis can be expressed in main verbs such as 1 In order to avoid ambiguity in the use of the term Path (Talmy's view or Matsumoto's view), this paper will treat Path and Deixis as separate elements, unless specifically stated.

The Spanish ‘present participle’: lexical elaboration of a morphosyntactic gap?

Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 2022

The Latin present participle in ‑nte(m) did not survive systematically in Romance. In Spanish, although a small number of forms in ‑nte may be considered inherited words, the overwhelming majority are cultured borrowings (cultismos) which hugely contributed to the elaboration of the written language; many have also diffused into everyday usage and are amongst the commonest words in the contemporary language. Such substantial cultural borrowing also paved the way for internal creations and later morphological calques from English forms in ‑ing, as a result of which forms in ‑nte are continuing to grow in both numbers and frequency. However, despite what may be seen as cultured experiments in the more systematic elaboration of a true present participle category in Spanish, forms in ‑nte came into competition with adjectives formed with the agentive suffix ‑dor, in which they were subject to restrictions of both an aspectual and pragmatic nature. This article traces the successful diffusion of ‑nte forms and suggests reasons which hindered their regaining total productivity.

Passives of Spanish Subject-Experiencer Psychological Verbs are Adjectival Passives

Probus: International Journal of Romance Linguistics, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp. 367–395, 2021

This paper argues that <ser 'to be' + past participle> constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that <ser + past participle> constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/ stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions.