Search

This paper addresses aspectual se in Spanish. Building on the previous analyses that have been proposed in the literature to account for constructions with aspectual se that mainly focus on the syntax of these (see, e.g., MacDonald, Jonathan E. 2017. Spanish aspectual se as an indirect object reflexive: The import of atelicity, bare nouns, and leísta PCC repairs. Probus. International Journal of Romance Linguistics 29(1). 73–118), this paper provides a semantic account that makes explicit (i) why dynamic predicates must be telic in the presence of se, and (ii) why the very same se can appear with a limited number of stative predicates, which are atelic. The account is implemented in the Figure/Path Relation model in Beavers, John. 2011. On affectedness. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29(2). 335–370, Figure/Path Relation model. I propose a maximization strategy that captures that dynamic predicates in constructions with se are always telic by indicating the conditions under which the theme has a fixed quantity and the scale/path that may be associated with the verb is bounded. This maximization strategy is then compared to and distinguished from the event maximization strategies proposed for Slavic languages (Filip, Hana. 2008. Events and maximalization: The case of telicity and perfectivity. In Susan Rothstein (ed.), Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, 217–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Hungarian (Kardos, Éva. 2016. Telicity marking in Hungarian. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 1(1). 1–37), and to the scale/path maximization strategy proposed for Southern Aymara (Martínez Vera, Gabriel. 2021a. Degree achievements and degree morphemes in competition in Southern Aymara. Linguistics and Philosophy 44. 695–735). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Backwards-looking operators Saarinen, E. [1979. "Backwards-Looking Operators in Tense Logic and in Natural Language." In Essays on Mathematical and Philosophical Logic, edited by J. Hintikka, I. Niiniluoto, and E. Saarinen, 341–367. Dordrecht: Reidel] that have the material in their scope depend on higher intensional operators, are known to increase the expressivity of some intensional languages and have thus played a central role in debates about approaches to intensionality in terms of implicit parameters (as in modal and tense logic) vs. variables explicitly quantifying over them. The current contribution takes a look at these operators from a type-logical perspective. It is shown that extending Gallin's ([Gallin, D. [1975. Intensional and Higher-Order Modal Logic. Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Company]) translation from intensional type logic (IL, Montague, R. [1970. "Universal Grammar." Theoria 36: 373–398]) to two-sorted type theory so as to include a version of Yanovich's (Yanovich, I. [2015. "Expressive Power of Now and Then Operators." Journal of Logic, Language and Information 24: 65–93]) backwards-looking operators, does not increase the expressive power of formulae with exclusively intensional parameters. The result, which makes use of a theorem by Zimmermann (Zimmermann, T. E. [1989. "Intensional Logic and Two-Sorted Type Theory." The Journal of Symbolic Logic 54 (1): 65–77]), is illustrated by pertinent examples from the literature. The paper closes by indicating alternative strategies of incorporating backwards-looking operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]