Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics

Los mejores diagnósticos sobre estados reunidos

2022-11-15T08:22:01+01:00

The study of states has traditionally suffered from a problem: until recently we lacked tests adequate enough to identify states, since most of these tests were tests that states failed, so this aspectual class could only be defined negatively. With the purpose of offering a useful tool to interested researchers, this article compiles more than twenty diagnoses on states. Along with the more classic (negative) diagnoses (developed in the traditions of Vendler-Dowty and Davidson), a good number of more recent diagnoses are included that already allow to positively characterize states.

Adjuntos, aspecto léxico y significado verbal

2022-11-08T07:51:35+01:00

This paper investigates how and why the lexical content of adjuncts contributes to specifying the aspectual information of verbs (and also other non-aspectual meanings), and what consequences this specification has for a general theory of the construction of the meaning of predication.

The hypothesis argues that adjuncts are predicated of fragments of the content, not only aspectual, of the predicates to which they are attached. Sub-lexical feature-agreement mechanisms legitimize combinations in which the predicate satisfies the selection constraints of the adjunct, discard non-matching combinations or rescue a non-matching combination by means of a coercion operation, in which the adjunct displays the required meaning in the predicate, if the words that make it up potentially contain it in their definition.

The adjunct focuses or visualizes sub-lexical contents of the verbal predicate, which explains why its presence disambiguates the aspectual polysemy of certain combinations of verb and complement. Likewise, its intervention is decisive for the legitimization of redundant and, therefore, informatively irrelevant predications.

This conception of the adjunct as a predicate of sub-lexical contents of the predicate with which it co-occurs allows us to circumvent the problems traditionally associated with its nature as a non-selected constituent whose appearance, on the other hand, is not always optional or unrestricted, nor is it indifferent to aspectual effects: the proposal also has interesting consequences for the analysis of a set of phenomena for which syntax does not seem to have an explanation.

El español de Puerto Rico en el siglo XXI: nuevos acercamientos lingüísticos y socioculturales

2022-10-13T11:02:42+02:00

Este trabajo presenta el conjunto de artículos que constituyen este número monográfico.

Review of 'Understanding and teaching reflexive sentences in Spanish'

2022-09-14T16:05:21+02:00

This is a review of González (2022) book on SE-structures.

Lexical aspect in Spanish: contrasts, syntactic structures and semantic interpretations

2022-09-09T13:31:52+02:00

The different distinctions related to lexical aspect –state, activity, accomplishments and achievements– play an important role in the grammar of Spanish, but many of the details about how these distinctions can be implemented are unclear: which features distinguish between the classes, how the classes relate to each other, what is the nature of telicity or dynamicity and how one can account for the alternations that a verb is subject to involving its aspect are some of the most important problems from this perspective. The goal of this article is to provide a sufficient empirical base to address these questions and present the current alternatives to answer them.

Sobre la sintaxis de las oraciones de relativo

2022-08-23T15:49:04+02:00

In this paper we examine existing analyses for relative clauses (mainly restrictive ones), and propose an analysis for Spanish relatives from the perspective of a lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). We will provide a summary of the main proposals in the literature and examine the questions that any analysis of relative clauses should address. Our TAG approach synthesises the descriptive and theoretical advantages of existing models (the head external analysis, the raising analysis, and the matching analysis) and offers a solution to some of the main problems that have been observed in the literature. We will focus on the internal configuration of relative clauses, their structural position, and the category of the expression que in Spanish.

The use of 'ocupar' as a verb of necessity in Mexican Spanish

2022-08-16T11:23:56+02:00

In Mexican Spanish, ocupar (‘to occupy’) is often employed as a verb of need and necessity, with a similar use and denotation to those of necesitar (‘to need’). Despite it being widespread, very little has been written about this phenomenon. In this article, I provide a description of this novel meaning. This description is supported by a Twitter-based study on the distribution of the meanings of ocupar around three Mexican cities. The quantitative analysis of the data confirms the extensive use of ocupar as necesitar, although to varying extents; concretely, it was found to be most frequent in Monterrey. In qualitative terms, I demonstrate that ocupar as necesitar is more often used to express need (i.e., with a nominal complement) than modal necessity (i.e., as a semiauxiliary with a sentential complement). Lastly, I propose that the emergence of this meaning represents a case of ongoing grammaticalization, whose origin can be traced back to older meanings via semantic reanalysis

Reseña de Ciapuscio, G. y A. Adelstein (Coord). La lingüística. Una introducción a sus principales preguntas

2022-08-05T08:28:02+02:00

Review of Ciapuscio, G. and A. Adelstein (Coord). La lingüística. Una introducción a sus principales preguntas

Some Remarks on the Origin of Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish

2022-07-04T17:33:06+02:00

A number of proposals have tried to account for the genesis and development of a set of Afro-Hispanic language varieties, the vernaculars that formed in Latin America from the contact between African languages and Spanish in colonial times (Sessarego 2021). This article presents a sociohistorical and linguistic analysis of Loza Spanish (LS), an Afro-Puerto Rican vernacular spoken in Loíza, Puerto Rico by the descendants of the Africans brought to this Caribbean island in colonial times to work as slaves on sugarcane plantations. This article assesses the evolution of this variety and its implications for creole studies. In so doing, it contributes to the long-lasting debate on the reasons behind the paucity of Spanish-based creoles in the Americas (Granda 1968 et seq.).

Indicative directive complements: mood and modal concord in Spanish

2022-09-12T08:34:59+02:00

Directive predicates are words with meanings that are similar to ‘order’, ‘require’, ‘recommend’, and ‘advise’. Being volitional in nature, directives are said to form part of the core group of subjunctive-taking predicates. This means that, like desiderative (e.g., querer que ‘to want that’) and purpose clauses (e.g., para que ‘so that’), they are expected to, and generally do, take the subjunctive. However, findings from the present investigation suggest that, in spite of this description, there are certain contexts in which indicative directive complements are strongly preferred. Analyses showed that indicative directive clauses are strongly preferable to subjunctive complements when the embedded verb is of the same modality type (e.g., teleological) and strength (e.g., weak necessity) as the matrix directive; i.e., when there is modal concord. In the case of subjunctive complements, they are preferable to indicative, only when there is no concord between the embedded and main directive predicates. These findings are significant, not only because directives are normatively described as requiring the subjunctive, but also because no previous studies have examined a link between mood and modal concord.