Prepositions as event licensors and the semantics of copular clauses

This paper discusses three broad issues of the syntax semantics interface such as a) the individual-level / stage-level distinction, b) the ontology of events (e.g. stative/eventive distinction) together with the role of prepositions in event structure, and c) the identification of events. The three of them are discussed here at the light of copular constructions like the ones illustrated in (1) below. Although it is unlikely I succeed in giving an optimal solution to the puzzles these sentences pose to us, I hope I can make a clear exposition of the issues and ways to approach them

Aspecto Léxico

This is an entry written by invitation to the Encyclopaedia on Hispanic Linguistics, mainly addressed to graduate and undergraduate students. The chapter includes a definition of the grammatical category known as Lexical Aspect, a classification of its types, its relation to other grammatical categories, essential bibliography on the topic, further references and a list of related entries

Las oraciones copulativas agentivas

This chapter presents a puzzle regarding the syntactic and semantic properties of copular clauses and an account for it. While copular clauses typically show stative properties some prove to have dynamic features according to established tests. The work is part of a book addressed to undergraduate and graduate students, edited in honour of the Spanish Grammarian Ignacio Bosque

Layers of Aspect

This talk presents theoretical issues about the algorithms leading to the imperfective/perfective contrast in natural languages. It was an invited presentation to the Seminar on Theoretical Syntax and Seminar at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Groningen

Notes on the syntax of deadjectival nominalizations

Arche and Marin presented a novel hypothesis about the syntax of nouns derived from adjectives in Spanish. The proposal defended can account for their semantics and distributional properties in a simple fashion dispensing with ad-hoc stipulations. This was an invited talk to a workshop on MorphoSyntax celebrated at the University of Girona in July 2017

Towards a unified treatment of Spanish copulas

This paper sets the basis for a uniform account of the alternation between the two Spanish copulas (ser and estar) in adjectival and passive clauses. While the copular contrast has been attributed to the different properties of adjectives (e.g. individual vs. stage level) and to an eventive vs. resultative stative dichotomy in passives, this work shows that they all behave alike regarding their temporal interpretation. We derive such uniformity from the syntactic properties of the copulas themselves: estar, includes an additional component ser lack that makes everything it merges with stative, with particular temporoaspectual properties

Syntax, semantics and morphology in second language acquisition

Languages may differ in the syntactic and semantic information they express overtly and how they express it, morphologically or through other means. These cross-linguistic differences are of paramount importance when acquiring a second language since they affect how the correlations between different forms and meanings are established. In this talk I will show that fine-grained knowledge of how the syntax and semantics properties are represented morphologically in languages is key to understand the process of second language acquisition. Such a refined insight allows us to identify the acquisition task that the learner faces in a precise manner and, correspondingly, contributes to our understanding of issues found in the classroom. A more precise linguistic technical understanding ultimately enables us to address learners’ needs. I will illustrate these points by drawing on my research on grammatical aspect, its cross-linguistic variation and its acquisition in a second language (Arche 2014; Domínguez, Arche & Myles 2017)

Rethinking the syntax of aspect

There is wide consensus at the moment that the category of aspect is in charge of introducing a temporal point of view. Also, it is generally accepted that aspect establishes a relation between two intervals, namely, the time the sentence refers to (the so-called topic time) and the time the situation runs over (event-time) (Klein 1994, 2009; Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2000, 2004, 2014, Kratzer 1998, a.o.). In this talk I discuss some issues with such a dyadic conception bringing evidence from Spanish progressive forms. In particular, I will discuss the differences between the analytical imperfective and perfective progressives and between them and their synthetic corresponding forms

Early use of null and overt subjects in L2 Spanish: evidence from two oral tasks

Recent research has shown that advanced English learners of Spanish can successfully acquire the syntactic, pragmatic and referential properties of null and overt subjects. However, acquiring these structures is problematic at beginner and at intermediate stages of acquisition for these learners. In this study, we investigate the emergence and development of null and overt subjects by 60 English learners of Spanish (20 beginners, 20 intermediate and 20 advanced) in order to understand why these forms are initially difficult to acquire. The oral data for this study were collected using a paired discussion task and a story retell and are freely available from the SPLLOC project (www.splloc.soton.ac.uk). We argue that the cline of difficulty suggested by Cho & Slabakova (2013), based on whether L1-L2 form-meaning mismatches require reassembly and whether a dedicated morpheme is available, makes appropriate predictions for these structures. We also argue that the type of task used to elicit the oral data and the overall linguistic and narrative abilities of the learners are also likely to influence the rate of use of these forms