Revisiting aspectualsein Spanish: telicity, statives, and maximization

Abstract

AbstractThis paper addresses aspectualsein Spanish. Building on the previous analyses that have been proposed in the literature to account for constructions with aspectualsethat mainly focus on the syntax of these (see, e.g., MacDonald, Jonathan E. 2017. Spanish aspectualseas an indirect object reflexive: The import of atelicity, bare nouns, and leísta PCC repairs.Probus. International Journal of Romance Linguistics29(1). 73–118), this paper provides a semantic account that makes explicit (i) why dynamic predicates must be telic in the presence ofse, and (ii) why the very samesecan 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 Theory29(2). 335–370, Figure/Path Relation model. I propose a maximization strategy that captures that dynamic predicates in constructions withseare 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 Linguistics1(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 Philosophy44. 695–735).