The Progressive-to-Imperfective shift

Contextually determined variation in Rioplatense, Iberian, and Mexican Altiplano Spanish

Martín Fuchs | Yale University

Ashwini Deo | The Ohio State University

María Mercedes Piñango | Yale University

Spanish has two markers (claimed to be in free alternation) to convey that an event is in progress at reference time: the Simple Present (e.g., canta, ‘sings’) and the Present Progressive (e.g., está cantando, ‘is singing’). Based on evidence from sentence acceptability studies in three different Spanish dialects, we show that the distribution of the two markers is not random, but sensitive to contextual modulation. Specifically, results show that the (ambiguous) Simple Present is more acceptable in contexts where interlocutors share perceptual access to the event at issue. Otherwise, participants favor the (unambiguous) Present Progressive. We conclude that this variation reflects and is constrained by the well-attested grammaticalization path in which progressive markers gradually generalize to become imperfective markers.

Keywords: grammaticalization, variation, progressive, imperfective, context modulation

Published online: 13 May 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.26.06fuc

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Fuchs, Martín & Maria Mercedes Piñango

2021. In Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 12], ► pp. 78 ff.

Fuchs, Martín, María Mercedes Piñango & Ashwini Deo

2021. In Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology [Language, Cognition, and Mind, 7], ► pp. 201 ff.

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