Location and the estar/ser alternation
This article is concerned with the syntactic factors that underlie the Spanish ser
‘BESER’/estar ‘BEESTAR’ alternation. In line with recent studies which have argued
that a prepositional feature is crucial to the alternation, it is argued here following
Zagona (2012) that a syntactic process of Locative agreement is crucial to
the alternation: a light verb BE that agrees with either a spatial or a temporal
locative constituent is spelled out as estar ‘BEESTAR’. This approach permits a
unified account of copular and auxiliary estar ‘BEESTAR’. In addition, it accounts
for the fact that the stage-level effect that is often attributed to estar is not found
in contexts where the copula agrees with a predicate of spatial location.
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Cited by 2 other publications
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«A praia está perto»: Zum Gebrauch des Verbs estar in Ausdrücken der statischen Lage im Portugiesischen .
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Mangialavori Rasia, Eugenia
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