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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 18:3 (2021) ► pp.459–478

The Ecuadorian Spanish benefactive and its inherent aspect

A reconstruction

| Leiden University
| Leiden University

The Spanish benefactive verbal periphrasis dar ‘give’ + gerund is unique to the Spanish spoken in Ecuador and it seems to have emerged in the historical Ecuadorian context of multilingualism. The analysis presented sheds light to the intricacies of the construction, taking into consideration the inherent aspect of the gerundial verb. Oral data was collected during two months of participant observation in Ecuador. The aspectual theoretical analysis of Verkuyl (1993), González (2003) and González and Verkuyl (2017) is applied to the data in order to determine the inherent aspectual value of the gerundial verb in the predications. The results show that there is an overwhelming use of terminative predications. Additionally, some predications that prima facie seem durative can be interpreted as terminative. This finding can be partially explained by particular linguistic phenomena only appearing in the Spanish in contact with Kichwa. Moreover, this study adds empirical proof of how relevant discourse is in aspectual representations.

Keywords: Kichwa, Spanish, inherent aspect, aspectual representation, dar ‘give’ + gerund
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sociolinguistic background
  • 3.Aspect
    • 3.1Aspectual theory
    • 3.2Andean phenomena relevant for aspectual theory
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Hypotheses
    • 4.2Data collection: Description of the corpus
    • 4.3Coding of the data
  • 5.Results
    • a.Cases with [−sqa] (uncountable internal arguments)
    • b.Cases with [−sqa] (internal arguments in plural and without determiner)
    • c.Cases without [sqa], that is, without internal argument
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 4 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.19027.gon
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