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Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reports the developmental stages of the acquisition of estar in stage-level predicate constructions in the L2 Spanish grammar of native speakers of French and Portuguese. Copular verbs exist in the L1s of both learner groups; however, only in Portuguese is there an aspectual contrast, with copula selection conditions that partially differ from those of ser and estar in Spanish. The study used data extracted from the Corpus de Aprendices de Español (CAES), made up of written texts produced by L2 Spanish learners from CEFR A1 to C1 levels. We attempt to analyse whether, and to what degree, these L2 learners are sensitive to estar copula restrictions in adjective constructions. Our analysis of the written production of 143 L1 French speakers and 361 L1 Portuguese speakers showed differing acquisitional patterns depending on the L1. We consider that the estar overextension, found in the learners' productions, is related to the process of developing the ability to identify the specific features that distinguish the use of copular verbs in the interlanguage of our learners. Our findings, thus, provide a more fine-grained description of the semantic representation and access of interpretable features in L2 Spanish with special relevance to current hypotheses on Second Language Acquisition such as the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín de Filología is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyzes the ingredients of a Romance construction, henceforth named the V ben V construction, consisting of a verb and its theme object in combination with a degree adverb ben '{well, really}' followed by a verb in past participle or an adjectival form. It describes the properties and restrictions of the various constituents involved in this construction, and it presents a new analysis focusing on the properties of the main predicate, the theme object, the degree adverb ben and the degree phrase ben+VPP/A. It accounts for the potential manner and result readings of the adjunct constituent that ben introduces (i) by postulating that the ben+VPP/A modifier always predicates of the (sub)event expressed by the verb (an activity or a change of state), (ii) by associating manner with a DO verbal layer, and result with a BECOME verbal layer, and (iii) by identifying different ASPectual structures in the complement position of the degree adverb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, I will pay attention to the behavior of adjectives such as altísimo and torpe, called ambivalent (Luján 1981) or underspecified (Fernández Leborans 1995), due to the fact that they can be combined with both the copulative verb ser and the copulative verb estar in languages such as Spanish. More specifically, I am interested in two structures, both of them dependent on the Spanish verb of perception ver. In the first, altísimo and torpe combine with the copula estar in infinitive clauses. In the second, subordinate infinitive clauses are headed by the copula ser. I will try to elucidate which is the contribution of the copulative verbs to the interpretation of these structures. With Escandell-Vidal (2018), I assume that the adjectives altísimo and torpe in combination with estar give rise to an evidential effect: the spatio-temporal situation to which the property they denote is anchored is conceived as a situation of visual experience. In the first of the structures I am interested in, the source of information is likewise encoded in the verb of perception. Therefore, the research question that will guide this study is whether the evidential content is actually being expressed twice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the purpose of this paper to analyze the grammatical behavior of two elements of Southern Cone Spanish described in the relevant literature as affixes: re and ité. Both share a number of morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties. For instance, they may be combined with different categorial classes (adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, verbs, nouns, and sentences) and they receive a similar appreciative meaning ('very', 'much', 'certainly', 'great' or 'true', depending on the categorial combination). Besides, both are used in informal speech, in the Rio de la Plata Spanish, mainly among the young people (re), and in the Paraguaian Spanish in contact with Guarani (ité). The proposed analysis of these elements follows the lines of Distributed Morphology, intending to reduce both the number of lexical entries and the inventory of formal features in syntax. Additionally, we expect to make a contribution to the general discussion about the concepts of quantification and intensification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxia is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the semantic and syntactic properties of French deverbal adjectives ending in ¬-ant, and shows that a subpart of these forms, while behaving as adjectives with regards to agreement and predicative position, are episodic and imperfective, similarly to present participles, whose suffix is formally similar. We first observe the various readings of -ant adjectives, i.e. dispositional, potential and habitual (Fábregas, Antonio. 2016. Deconstructing the non-episodic readings of Spanish deverbal adjectives. Word Structure 9-1. 1–41; Fábregas, Antonio. 2020. Morphologically derived adjectives in Spanish. John Benjamins), and show that they parallel those of the corresponding verbs when they occur in generic sentences. We then show that some of these -ant adjectives refer to specific events and that the sentences in which they occur are semantically equivalent to those containing imperfective or progressive verbs forms, as shown by their positive reaction to the imperfective tests. Turning to the verbal bases of episodic -ant adjectives, we observe that they derive from a restricted number of atelic verbs, that surface without direct objects, have non-active subjects, and include a degree component in their lexical meaning. We finally provide a syntactic analysis of -ant adjectives, that relies on the idea that they contain both verbal and adjectival projections in their inner structure. We hypothesize that episodic adjectives are built by the means of a particular adjectival -ant marker, that maintains the imperfective value of the present participle marker. By contrast, other -ant adjectives are built by a homophonous adjectival suffix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Aspectual modifiers that have adverbial and adjectival counterparts are an important source of information for researching lexical aspect in the nominal domain. One class of such modifiers are adverbs of completeness (completamente 'completely', totalmente 'totally'), which are maximizers when modify adjectives, and their correspondent adjectives (completo 'complete', total 'total'). This paper addresses the inheritance of aspectual features and its relation to degree in event nominalizations of incremental theme verbs (traduccción 'translation', destrucción 'destruction') through the analysis of the modification performed by adjectives of completeness in Spanish. The proposal combines a syntactic account of deverbal nominalizations with a scalar approach to aspect. Adjectives of completeness are argued to be aspectual modifiers, with a contribution equivalent to that of their adverbial counterparts both in the verbal and in the adjectival domain, establishing thus a parallelism between degree modification of adjectives, verbs and nominals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]