On the meaning of prepositional resultatives with hasta in contemporary Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

This paper offers the most significant results derived from the preliminary semantic analysis carried out on the 455 Spanish prepositional resultatives headed by the telic preposition hasta that conform our corpus. Specifically, we will show that their meaning is not homogenous since two clear cases are to be differentiated: on the one hand, those which have literal meaning, like hasta la muerte in La misma asesina, por lo tanto, que torturó a Loperena hasta la muerte, and on the other, those with a figurative interpretation like hasta el agotamiento in La curiosidad lo hizo esforzarse hasta el agotamiento. Though both readings entail an hyperbolic meaning of excess and exaggeration, we will demonstrate, furthermore, that only the latter, called “degree resultatives”, following Hoeksema and Napoli (2019), have recently depeloped an intensifying function in the language, which is increasingly growing as time goes by.