Conciliating States and Locations. Towards a More Comprehensive and In-depth Account of the Spanish Copula Estar.

MANGIALAVORI RASIA, MARÍA EUGENIA

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

DE GRUYTER MOUTON

Lugar: Boston; Año: 2015 vol. 6 p. 37 - 78

2199-3386

The case of estar may reveal how different proposals have failed to grasp grammatically relevant semantic features shared by its occurrences. The results of this study indicate that an integrative analysis of estar clauses would account not only for the consistent lexical properties observed, including (a)analogous lexical-syntactic structure correctly predicting possible copular complements, (b)analogous selectional restrictions and (c)interpretive effects; along with a natural explanation for the complementary distribution of two aspectually nontrivial verbal alternations (ser/estar and estar/haber). Our proposal builds on the standard syntactic structure of copular clauses associated to locative predicates (against what traditional Spanish grammar suggests), drawing also on (i) the structural analogy between estar?s alternative complements (APs and PPs) and (ii) the understanding of states as abstract spatial domains (be at). Thus, the eventual differences between clauses like estoy triste ?I?m sad? and estoy en casa ?I?m home? could be treated and explained in a unified and elegant way by virtue of the semantic/syntactic properties of the lexical-syntactic structure involved.