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New Perspectives on the Study of Ser and Estar
Edited by Isabel Pérez-Jiménez, Manuel Leonetti and Silvia Gumiel-Molina
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 147–172

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.

Keywords: estar, individual-level predicates, locative agreement, locatives, ser, stage-level predicates
Published online: 28 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.5.06zag
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