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The delayed acquisition of Spanish ser and estar is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the developmental trajectory including its age distribution? We examine Spanish copula production and comprehension in 142 children (age range: 4–12 years) and 26 adults. Using two tasks, sentence-choice (comprehension) and cued-production (production), we test the hypothesis that estar use is constrained by an ability to construe an alternative to the copula predication; an ability that develops with life experience. We test estar / ser use in two contexts: alternative-supporting, favoring estar use; and alternative-neutral, neutral regarding estar use, and possibly favoring ser use. The results show that for comprehension, children do not reveal adult-level sensitivity to context, exhibiting instead over-selection of estar sentences. For production, all children over-produce the estar sentence, even after having just chosen the ser counterpart. However, in this task, the 10- to 12-year-olds do behave similarly to adults and differently from 4- to 6-year-olds, consistent with our hypothesis. Alternative construal requires exposure to entities and properties in a variety of situations; exposure that older children are more likely to exhibit. Collectively, these results (1) support the properties of estar use hypothesized to underlie the language-world-knowledge integration, and (2) delineate a potential developmental trajectory whereby mastery of the copula may not begin to manifest until 10–12 years of age, not because of any one linguistic factor but rather due to specific world-knowledge exposure constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a contemporary critical overview of both accounts of linguistic meaning, Semantics and Pragmatics, and the different ways they complement each other in Spanish Linguistics. Employing as examples a number of polemic case studies in Spanish (the semantic ambiguities of cierto and otro, the determination of algunos’ reference, the pragmatic effect of discourse markers, and the discrepancy of case in psychological verbs depending upon their interpretation), the article criticizes both the simple recognition of a gap between Semantics and Pragmatics and the tendency to overuse implicatures as the only pragmatic mechanism capable of explaining linguistic meaning. The reason is that neither can linguist meaning be reduced to linguistic content (“what is said”), nor can speaker intentions explain the meaning of every utterance (“what is meant”). The chapter then concludes that, since both Semantics and Pragmatics are comprehensive studies about linguistic meaning (even though they serve two different purposes), different inferential patterns can be established in order to identify a common ground based on which the hearer often reconstrues the meaning of the utterance (“what is interpreted”). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]