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Verb Classes and Aspect
Edited by Elisa Barrajón López, José Luis Cifuentes Honrubia and Susana Rodríguez Rosique
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 9] 2015
► pp. 238–263

On events that express properties

| Complutense University of Madrid
| Complutense University of Madrid

This paper provides empirical support to the hypothesis that habitual readings and dispositional/capacitative readings are different kinds of generic statements, generated by different operators: an aspectual operator HABASP is responsible for the habitual reading and a like modal dispositional operator MODDISP is responsible for the dispositional reading. We analyze the Spanish construction <ser muy de + infinitive>, ex. María es muy de fumar puros (lit. [María is very of smoking cigars]). This construction put together the meaning of a habitual sentence like María often smokes cigars, realized in the infinitive clause, and the meaning of an Individual Level predicate like María is a cigar smoker, realized in a predicative prepositional phrase muy de. Our analysis explains both the properties of the construction as an IL-predicate that contain an infinitive clause with habitual reading and the restrictions about the predicates that can enter the construction.

Keywords: dispositional, habitual, IL predicates, imperfective gnomics, infinitive, SL predicates
Published online: 25 November 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.9.11fer
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