Building up locations from directional Phrases: divergent uses of estar hasta in Spanish varieties.

MANGIALAVORI RASIA, MARÍA EUGENIA

Journal of Romance Philology (Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie)

De Gruyter

Año: 2022 vol. 5 p. 233 - 259

1865-9063

This paper investigates divergent distributional patterns drawn by spatial prepositions in Spanish. We focus on constructions in Mexican Spanish [MS] where the copula estar ?be? and a prepositional predicate headed by a directional boundary preposition hasta ?until? are productively combined to yield a distinct, complex spatial predicate with additional semantic implications. This combination is (i)disallowed in standard Spanish; (ii)unpredicted according to general (crosslanguage) principles on spatial prepositions and stative verbs. We observe that these instances ? and the putative semantic conflict between a stative verb and a directional preposition ? are accommodated under a general condition on directional Ps bearing on endpoint interpretation. We argue that visible distributional divergences relate to the fact that, in varieties like MS, grammar systematically allows for non-trivial prepositional alternations (estar en/hasta ?be at/be at [from here]) producing sufficiently different constructions with consequent asymmetries in semantic complexity (e.g. location vs perspectival location), hence differing in the possibility to encode simple location vs. relative location with respect to a reference object along with distance/route.Keywords: copula, estar, location, prepositions, directional, stative, no-trivial alternation.