Spanish in Context - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2023

A sentence like María está muy guapa (‘María looks very pretty’) attributes the property of being pretty to María but also conveys the assumption that the state-of-affairs described is based on direct experience. Several explanatory hypotheses are found in the literature to account for this fact: (i) experientiality is a property of the copula estar; (ii) experientiality is an effect of contextual factors; and (iii) experientiality is the result of resolving the aspectual mismatch produced by combining estar with an Individual-Level Predicate (ILP). To test the predictions of these hypotheses, a comprehension-based survey was carried out. Participants were given isolated copular sentences with estar followed by either an ILP or an SLP (Stage-Level Predicate). Using a 5-point Likert scale, they had to rate how likely it was that the utterer had direct experience about the quality s/he was asserting. The results show a significant preference for the experiential interpretation in estar+ILP, an outcome that is consistent only with the hypothesis that the linguistic mismatch found in estar+ILP is enough to induce the accommodation of a direct experience presupposition.

This paper reports the developmental stages of the acquisition of estar in stage-level predicate constructions in the L2 Spanish grammar of native speakers of French and Portuguese. Copular verbs exist in the L1s of both learner groups; however, only in Portuguese is there an aspectual contrast, with copula selection conditions that partially differ from those of ser and estar in Spanish. The study used data extracted from the Corpus de Aprendices de Español (CAES), made up of written texts produced by L2 Spanish learners from CEFR A1 to C1 levels. We attempt to analyse whether, and to what degree, these L2 learners are sensitive to estar copula restrictions in adjective constructions. Our analysis of the written production of 143 L1 French speakers and 361 L1 Portuguese speakers showed differing acquisitional patterns depending on the L1. We consider that the estar overextension, found in the learners’ productions, is related to the process of developing the ability to identify the specific features that distinguish the use of copular verbs in the interlanguage of our learners. Our findings, thus, provide a more fine-grained description of the semantic representation and access of interpretable features in L2 Spanish with special relevance to current hypotheses on Second Language Acquisition such as the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009).

The article describes the behavior of aesthetic adjectives (bonito ‘beautiful’) in the so-called innovative constructions with estar ‘beestar’, documented in some American varieties of Spanish. These innovative structures (El poema está bonito ‘The poem is beautiful’) do not compare stages of the subject with respect to an aesthetic property (as would be their meaning in general Spanish), but rather express a perspectivized assertion, linked to the subjective judgment of the speaker about a particular quality. The article explains this pattern of variation on the basis of the work by Gumiel-Molina, Moreno-Quibén and Pérez-Jiménez (2020) and Moreno-Quibén (2022), according to which the classes of adjectives that appear in perspectivized estar-sentences have undergone a process of argument augmentation. Aesthetic adjectives in innovative estar-construction have an experiencer in their argument structure in the varieties of Spanish where this construction is possible. This experiencer serves as the basis for establishing the comparison required by estar and ultimately gives rise to the subjective/perspectivized meaning of the copular structure.

States, long considered a homogeneous event class, have been shown to actually decompose into sufficiently distinct aspectual types. Davidsonian and Kimian statives (Maienborn 2008; Rothmayr 2009), for instance, show a major contrast in presence/absence of event-related properties, including finer-grained (sub)class distinctions. Within the Davidsonian (mixed eventive-stative) type, a novel class has been identified using Spanish data as reference (Marín and McNally 2011). This class, dubbed inchoative stative is characterized by including a left boundary (Piñón 1997) marking the temporal onset of the state. We focus on documented Old Spanish data to argue that non-eventive (Kimian-like) left-bounded states are also possible. We note that productive combinations of the locative copula estar ‘be-loc’ with past participles of specific verbs produce distinct selectional and interpretive patterns defined by (i) pure states (homogenous spatial situation); (ii) no change-of-state/location denotation; (iii) left boundary. If correct, data suggest that inchoative stativity is not necessarily a Davidsonian type of predication; and that two distinct types of inchoative statives should be carefully differentiated under (more) specific criteria.

The Spanish copula verb estar is currently taking part in two of the most well-known paths of semantic change across different dialectal varieties of Spanish: (a) as a main copula verb, in its encroachment on the domain of ser, and (b) as the auxiliary in the Present Progressive marker, as it encroaches in the domain of the Simple Present form (i.e., Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Fuchs 2020). Here we argue for the hypothesis that estar’s participation in both paths of change is not coincidental. Focusing on the copular use, we present arguments for the proposal that estar’s encroachment is connected to its lexico-conceptual structure, which, under specific communicative pressures, is afforded greater conversational informativity, thus systematically expanding its licensing contexts and, as a result, bolstering its use. Evidence consistent with this analysis emerges from use variation for estar across several dialects of Spanish, both in its copular and auxiliary uses.

Discovering, comparing, and contrasting natural kinds is critical for scientific progress. It should be the goal of linguistic inquiry to seek out natural kinds within and between languages. Unfortunately, the most common definition of a copula is consistently inadequate for categorizing and comparing the data in cross-linguistic research on this topic. The categories of pseudo-copula and semi-copula have been offered to account for constructions which resemble the copular relationship between subject and complement, though with added meaning in that relationship. I will argue that copulas, defined more broadly, function in diverse ways cross-linguistically to instantiate the alterable feature-driven relationship between subject and complement. This article presents a gradient view of copulas based on a set of binary featural parameters with which a language may represent with one or more copulas. A formal description of this phenomena is also offered within in the framework of Distributed Morphology, building on Wilson (2020).