Abstract
In many varieties of American Spanish, the temporal preposition hasta 'until' is able to modify telic predicates in the absence of negation. Previous analyses argue for either a hidden negation or a special punctual reading of this preposition. We show that these analyses make a number of wrong predictions, and should be abandoned. Our account hinges on the idea that hasta licenses a temporal phase previous to the telic predicate, somehow similar to the one that in PP complements (in one hour) create in English and many other languages in similar structures. We also show that desde (‘since’) is able to behave in a parallel way in some varieties of American Spanish, thus licensing intervals subsequent to temporal points. Several arguments are presented favoring compositional analyses of these (and some other) temporal prepositions subject to Aktionsart restrictions, as opposed to approaches which introduce multiplication of senses.
Highlights
There seems to be a general agreement on the fact that temporal connectives are two-place predicates (Heinämäki 1974, Hitzeman 1991, Tovena 1996, García Fernández 2000, Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarría 2004, Brugè and Suñer 2008, among many others)
If we apply this reasonable assumption to the Spanish temporal preposition hasta (‘until’) in (1), (1) Juan vivió en París hasta 1986
We suggest that the interval previous to the event which the preposition hasta creates for Mexican and Caribbean Spanish (M&CS) speakers is intended to be long, or at least longer than expected
Summary
There seems to be a general agreement on the fact that temporal connectives are two-place predicates (Heinämäki 1974, Hitzeman 1991, Tovena 1996, García Fernández 2000, Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarría 2004, Brugè and Suñer 2008, among many others). Spanish hasta (‘until’) is said to combine only with durative predicates (García Fernández 2000: 106 and references therein), just as its counterparts in many other languages The combination of these two assumptions naturally accounts for the fact that, as expected, the event in (1) is durative, and its internal argument is punctual. The main grammatical patterns of the geographical distribution of temporal hasta in present-day Spanish are the ones exemplified by the sentences in (3) and (4):. Juan trabajó en esta fábrica hasta que se casó Prescriptive accounts of this data (for example, Moreno de Alba 1987: 2426) often assume that sentences such as those in (7) and (8) are ambiguous, and present this ambiguity as an argument to condemn the reading in the “b” variants, or at least to suggest that this pattern should be avoided. ‘The girl fainted when she entered her apartment, not before’
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