The Progressive-to-Imperfective shift
Contextually determined variation in Rioplatense, Iberian, and
Mexican Altiplano Spanish
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Morphosemantic considerations of the Progressive-to-Imperfective
shift
- 2.1A synchronic characterization of the Progressive and
Imperfective meanings
- 2.2The grammaticalization path from prog to
impf
- 3.The Spanish Progressive and Imperfective markers
- 4.An experimental study in three dialects of Spanish
- 4.1Methods
- 4.2Procedure
- 4.3Subjects
- 4.4Predictions
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and concluding remarks
-
Notes
-
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Fuchs, Martín & Maria Mercedes Piñango
Fuchs, Martín, María Mercedes Piñango & Ashwini Deo
2021.
Operationalizing the Role of Context in Language Variation: The Role of Perspective Alignment in the Spanish Imperfective Domain. In
Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology [
Language, Cognition, and Mind, 7],
► pp. 201 ff.

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