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Aspects of Latin American Spanish Dialectology: In honor of Terrell A. Morgan
Edited by Manuel Díaz-Campos and Sandro Sessarego
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 32] 2021
► pp. 69–94

Chapter 4
Variation and pragmatic enrichment

Dar + gerund in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish

| Saint Louis University

Dar + gerund is a periphrastic benefactive found in the Spanish of highland Ecuador and southern Colombia. Prior research has focused on the construction’s origin, syntactic constraints, and politeness: the present study examines the pragmatic restrictions of dar + gerund declaratives. Using native speaker intuitions and heuristics from previous studies, I show that the most significant implication present is that it is not the sole responsibility of the agent to do the task. Thus, Daniel dio lavando la ropa is felicitous if Daniel is part of a group of people responsible for washing the clothes or if it was someone else’s responsibility entirely, but infelicitous if Daniel was solely responsible.

Keywords: Ecuadorian Spanish, dar + gerund, projective content, pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1What is dar + gerund?
    • 2.2Syntactic and semantic constraints
    • 2.3Attenuation and pragmatic constraints
    • 2.4Theoretical framework
    • 2.5Data elicitation
  • 3.Diagnosing dar +gerund
    • 3.1What implications are present?
    • 3.2Strong Contextual Felicity
    • 3.3Projection
    • 3.4Obligatory Local Effect
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Classification of dar + gerund
    • 4.2Comparison between imperative and declarative uses
    • 4.3Limitations and future directions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 January 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.32.04gar
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Guerra, Kathleen S.
2023. Context-specific use and ideology: perception of appropriate domains for dar + gerund. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 16:2 ► pp. 447 ff. DOI logo

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