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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 209–224

Spanish estarse is not only agentive, but also inchoative

| Université Lille 3 – CNRS
| University of Tromsø

This article explores the properties of constructions involving the stage level copula estar with the pronominal form se, which has been argued to encode an agentive component lacking from the non se-marked form. While several previous studies have argued that estarse constructions involve a dynamic and telic component similar to an achievement, the goal of this contribution is to show that estarse is essentially stative, lacking all kinds of dynamicity and telicity, and should be analysed as an inchoative state, that is, a state that encodes its onset, but not the culmination of the transition preceding it. We show that this analysis overcomes the problems of previous proposals with respect to the temporal and aspectual behaviour of estarse constructions.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bringing aspect under control
    • 2.1The stative denotation of estarse
      • 2.1.1Tests examined in Gómez & García (2013)
      • 2.1.2Additional tests on the stativity of estarse
    • 2.2 Estarse does not entail telicity
    • 2.3 Estarse is not so punctual
    • 2.4The inchoative denotation of estarse
  • 3.Analysis: estarse denotes an inchoative state
    • 3.1Previous analyses
    • 3.2Inchoative states
      • 3.2.1 Bar-el (2005)
      • 3.2.2Right and left boundaries
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.13mar
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