Spanish estarse is not only agentive, but also
inchoative
This article explores the properties of constructions involving the stage
level copula estar with the pronominal form
se, which has been argued to encode an agentive
component lacking from the non se-marked form. While several previous
studies have argued that estarse constructions involve a
dynamic and telic component similar to an achievement, the goal of this
contribution is to show that estarse is essentially
stative, lacking all kinds of dynamicity and telicity, and should be
analysed as an inchoative state, that is, a state that encodes its onset,
but not the culmination of the transition preceding it. We show that this
analysis overcomes the problems of previous proposals with respect to the
temporal and aspectual behaviour of estarse
constructions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Bringing aspect under control
- 2.1The stative denotation of estarse
- 2.1.1Tests examined in Gómez & García (2013)
- 2.1.2Additional tests on the stativity of estarse
- 2.2
Estarse does not entail telicity
- 2.3
Estarse is not so punctual
- 2.4The inchoative denotation of estarse
- 3.Analysis: estarse denotes an inchoative state
- 3.1Previous analyses
- 3.2Inchoative states
- 3.2.1
Bar-el (2005)
- 3.2.2Right and left boundaries
- 4.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgments
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Fábregas, Antonio
2021.
SE in Spanish.
Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 10:2
► pp. 1 ff.
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