The Ecuadorian Spanish benefactive and its inherent aspect
A reconstruction
The Spanish benefactive verbal periphrasis
dar ‘give’ + gerund is unique to the Spanish spoken in
Ecuador and it seems to have emerged in the historical Ecuadorian context of multilingualism. The analysis presented sheds light
to the intricacies of the construction, taking into consideration the inherent aspect of the gerundial verb. Oral data was
collected during two months of participant observation in Ecuador. The aspectual theoretical analysis of
Verkuyl (1993),
González (2003) and
González and Verkuyl (2017) is applied to the data in order to determine the inherent aspectual
value of the gerundial verb in the predications. The results show that there is an overwhelming use of terminative predications.
Additionally, some predications that prima facie seem durative can be interpreted as terminative. This finding can be partially
explained by particular linguistic phenomena only appearing in the Spanish in contact with Kichwa. Moreover, this study adds
empirical proof of how relevant discourse is in aspectual representations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Sociolinguistic background
- 3.Aspect
- 3.1Aspectual theory
- 3.2Andean phenomena relevant for aspectual theory
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Hypotheses
- 4.2Data collection: Description of the corpus
- 4.3Coding of the data
- 5.Results
- a.Cases with [−sqa] (uncountable internal arguments)
- b.Cases with [−sqa] (internal arguments in plural and without determiner)
- c.Cases without [sqa], that is, without internal argument
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- List of abbreviations
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Guerra, Kathleen S.
2023.
Context-specific use and ideology: perception of appropriate domains for dar + gerund.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 16:2
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