Procedural dynamicity and focus on transition: The case of Spanish “ya”

Abstract

This paper presents a semantic analysis for Spanish ya, translated roughly into English as already. Ya has been treated in the literature in a diversity of ways: mostly as an adverb of time, but also as an aspectual marker, as a presuppositional adverb, as a focus marker, as a modal adverb, as an epistemic operator and as a conceptual anchor (Bosque, 1980; Löbner, 1989, 1999; Girón Alconchel, 1991; Garrido, 1993; García Fernández, 1999; Fernández and De Miguel, 1999; Pavón Lucero, 1999; Delbecque and Maldonado, 2009). We propose that the semantic content of this lexical item is better explained in procedural terms. We suggest that ya encodes in its semantics two semantic procedures: an instruction to incorporate in the interpretation an assumption about the transition from a previous state of affairs ([+DYNAMICITY]), and an instruction to incorporate in the context of interpretation a mutually manifest assumption about the previous continuity ([+DURATIVITY]) of that state of affairs. We will show how this semantic content operates along different cognitive domains to produce the wide variety of uses and pragmatic effects displayed by ya. Our results show the advantages of considering that semantic features such as dynamicity and durativity can be encoded in linguistic items either conceptually or procedurally.