Program
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What do Spanish copulas have in common with Tibetan evidentials?
José Camacho Rutgers University
The distinction between the two copular verbs ser| and estar has traditionally been related to aspectual properties of the predicate or the copula. In this paper I approach a subset of the distribution of ser and estar by comparing it to the distribution of Tibetan evidentials dug, song and shag (cf. Kalsang et al., 2012, a.o.). A priori, one might thing that evidentiality (the source of evidence for one’s statement) should have very little to do with the aspectual partition of copular verbs in Spanish. However, we will see that these two categories overlap
in a striking ways, and we will attempt to develop an analysis for aspects of ser/estar that builds on insights about direct evidentials in Tibetan, particularly those of Kalsang et al. (2012). Specifically, they argue that the properties of these evidentials follows from the different inclusion relationships between situations, within a situation-semantics framework. The stage-level evidential and estar signal that the Event Situation is contained within the Information Situation, whereas the individual-level evidential and ser signals the opposite relation: the Information Situation is contained in the Event Situation. This analysis accounts for some of the aspectual properties suggested for estar, as well as the well-known evidential uses.
Ser and estar in combination with adjectives denoting human beauty: semantic and pragmatic aspects
Johan Falk
Stockholm University
This presentation is focused on the semantic values and pragmatic effects that arise from the alternation of ser and estar in combination with adjectives denoting human beauty and the contrary (guapo, bonito, lindo, hermoso; feo). The fact that predications with ser-A and estar-A is framed by general and individual norms respectively gives rise to an array of questions: Is ser-guapo and estar-guapo a case of polysemy? What does the “restrictive” or contingent value of estar mean from a semantic and pragmatic point of view? If not, how do they relate to each other semantically? Does estar-guapo entail that the subject is considered not ‘guapo’ in some sense? Pragmatically speaking, can it be offensive to say to somebody that (s)he está-guapo/a? And if so, in which circumstances? The basis of the analysis are natural examples drawn from CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) where special attention is paid to examples where both ser-A and estar-A enter into contact and to the surrounding context in order to study the pragmatic implications of uses.
Stage-Level predicates and layers of aspectuality. Ser and estar again
María J. Arche
University of Greenwich
This paper discusses how the contrast known as Individual-Level/Stage-Level, as observed in the dichotomy of Spanish copular verbs ser/estar with adjectives (Juan es/está guapo), is implemented in the grammar. In particular, the talk addresses the role of aspectual heads in the make up of the copular verbs, the level where this happens (outer aspect, inner aspect or at an even lower structural level), and the consequences of this for the temporal layout of the clause.
SER and ESTAR, and the role of semantic structure
Francesco Alessio Ursini
Macquarie University – Stockholm University
There is a general consensus that occurrence of ser and estar in sentences is determined by the semantic properties of their complement Phrases. A recent proposal on Adjectival Phrases contends that the scalar structure of APs determines whether ser or estar can occur in a sentence (Gumiel- Molina & Pérez-Jiménez, 2012). While APs denoting non-scalar structures (alto) combine with ser, APs denoting scalar structures combine with estar (cf. Kennedy & McNally, 2005). However, this proposal does not cover any data beyond APs, so it is not clear whether it can be generalized to all complement XPs. The goal of this talk is two-fold. One goal is to propose a possible discuss a possible extension of this proposal to two other types of Phrases: Prepositional Phrases (PPs), and Verbal Phrases (VPs). A second goal is to analyze whether this theory has a superior theoretical import with respect to other theories on the ser/estar alternation.
Another subvariety of states
Luis García & Diana Gómez
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
We examine the constructions formed by the copula estar and the clitic pronoun se in combination with a set of predicates like quieto (‘still’), callado (‘quiet’), acostado (‘laid down’), agachado (‘crouched’), en casa (‘at home’), etc. Some of the examples above pattern with Levin & Rappaport Hovav’s (1995) class of “maintain position sense”, i.e. verbs that describe the maintenance of a determined position by an animate and agentive entity. The set of data analysed suggests that the clitic se promotes the entity denoted by the subject to agent. Entities that can realize the role of agent are presumably restricted to those having the features [+animate] and [+volitional]. This analysis of the clitic is extended to some instances of movement verbs that also appear with it: Juan salió de la reunión a las 12 (‘John got out of the meeting at 12’ and the meeting finished at 12) vs. Juan se salió de la reunion a las 12 (‘John left the meeting at 12’ and the meeting finished later).
Sentences as predicates? The Spanish construction <ser muy de + infinitive>
Mª Jesús Fernández Leborans / Cristina Sánchez López
Complutense University of Madrid
The main goal of this work is to develop an account of the syntactic and semantic properties of the Spanish prepositonal phrases introduced by de ‘of’ functioning as gradable predicates in copular constructions with ser ‘be’, where the preposition introduces a non finite sentence, i.e. Ella es muy de ayudar a todos ‘She is very of helping everybody’. The whole construction is a characterizing sentence and the prepositional phrase denotes an individual level predicate. Our main concerns are a) the syntactic contribution of de ‘of’ to the licensing of the non finite clause as a characterizing predicate; b) the interaction between gradability and individual level predication; c) the way in which the habitual/intensive reading (Ella es muy de ayudar ‘she usually helps’/’she loves to help’) and the modal deontic reading (Su reacción es de temer ‘her reaction must be feared’) arise.
Ser and Estar: what is there to be learned and how do first-language learners learn it?
Cristina Schmitt, Carolina Holtheuer & Karen Miller
Michigan State University - Universidad de Chile - Penn State University
In this paper we articulate an acquisition model for the acquisition of ser and estar by first language learners and we back the model up with experimental results from our recent work. Because the copulas are not in a subset relation, the Semantic Subset Principle (Crain et al 1994) cannot guide the acquisition process. Rather the steps must rely on syntactic, semantic and discourse information. Step 1 is a distributional analysis and by age 2 children seem to have pretty much mastered it. Step 2 links ser to genericity. We propose that children start by linking the appearance of ser to a lack of restrictions to a specific discourse situation and to world stable characeristics. Step 3 links estar to specific topic situations, which then becomes part of the presuppositional content of estar. This step is quite delayed, given what we know from other work on acquisition of presuppositions (Karmiloff-Smith 1979; Schultz 2003). Step 4 is the adult behavior when children learn to efficiently apply Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991) and choose the appropriate copula in particular situations.
Spanish copula constructions with adjectives: What monolingual, bilingual and trilingual acquisition tell us about the syntactic derivation of SER and ESTAR
Laia Arnaus Gil
Bergische Universität Wuppertal
A syntactic proposal for Spanish copular verbs (e.g. Remberger & González-Vilbazo 2007) is able to capture partially the aspectual differences between IL/SL predicates (Carlson 1977) in sentences like Tomás es/está guapoILP/SLP. Yet, it fails to explain the same distinction in other contexts in which only one is allowed (Luís es/*está inteligenteILP, Sofía *es/está contentaSLP). For these last contexts, copula selection might take place before syntax, i.e. at the lexical level. In a nutshell, a lexical and a syntactic copula selection will be proposed: Adjectives like inteligenteILP and contentaSLP receive the corresponding property lexically (i.e. lexical adjectives). As for the second group, the SL property is also lexicalized and thus inserted in the head position of TP. By contrast, the assignment of an IL quality will require the incorporation of SER in the syntactic derivation under Vº. In a head-complement relation between SER in V° and its adjective in AP, the former will assign the IL property to the predicate (i.e. lexical-syntactic adjectives).
The longitudinal and cross-sectional data of 39 monolingual, bilingual and trilingual children (2;0-6;5) show that they distinguish between those two groups of adjectives. In short, lexical adjectives are generally accompanied by the respective target-like Spanish copula verb. The lexical-syntactic adjectives show more target deviant productions. These are concentrated on SER-contexts.
Origins and development of Spanish estar + past participle
Cristina Sánchez Marco & Rafael Marín
UPF - CNRS
So far it has been assumed that most uses of Spanish estar arise some time later than ser, and that the former eventually takes over most uses of the latter. Previous analyses of change in estar claim that this construction generalizes its usage as a result of some reanalysis or grammaticalization change, presumably taking over result state and locative uses of ser.
In this talk we want to go one step further and investigate the questions of how estar + participle emerges in Old Spanish, and how it extends its usage taking over ser, based on the empirical analysis of data coming from a large-scale corpus of Spanish containing texts from the 12th to the 20th century. The idea we want to argue for is that the first and more frequent uses of estar determine the way the participial construction emerges and further extends taking over ser, and that the mechanism which drives this development is analogy. Specifically, we want to argue that this development is driven by the analogical relations established between participles appearing with this verb and locative prepositional modifiers.
Different ways of being polite: aspectual composition in Spanish ser and estar sentences
Yuko Morimoto - Mª Victoria Pavón Lucero
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
We will try to demonstrate that coercion is not involved in cases like No has estado muy cortés (‘You have not been very polite’) or ¡Sé valiente! (‘Be brave!’), in which two alleged individual level (IL) predicates, the adjectives valiente and cortés, are interpreted as stage level (SL) predicates. We defend that the IL-SL distinction is not encoded exclusively at the lexical level. Adjectives like valiente or cortés belong to a class of predicates that are lexically undetermined with respect to that distinction (see Dowty 1979, for an interesting discussion concerning the so-called “agentive” adjectives and predicate nominals in examples like be polite or be a hero), and they achieve an IL or SL interpretation depending on the syntactic or discursive context in which they appear. So, we will propose that IL-SL opposition is a matter of aspectual composition which can take place at different levels of derivation: lexical, syntactic and pragmatic-discursive.
ESTAR HAS BE
Cristina Real Puigdollers
UAB
This paper proposes a compositional analysis of the ser and estar system in Catalan, and ultimately its differences with Spanish and Portuguese. I propose that estar comes from the verb have plus a preposition of location. I sustain with classical compositional approaches of have (Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993) that have is the verb be plus a preposition of possession or central coincidence. At the same time, I consider that the simple copulative verb be is a pronominal element, following Postma (1993). Thus, I explore the hypothesis that ser-copula is just a type of pronominal copular. This hypothesis allows us to relate the discussion about ser/estar with the study of pronominal and verbal copulas cross-linguistically (Adger and Ramchand 2003; Citko 2008). According to Citko (2008) pronominal and verbal copulas have different syntactic properties: while verbal copulas might select DPs, APs and PPs and form predicational interpretations, pronominal copulas normally select DPs and might be specificational or predicational, but only for inherent properties, namely, individual stage predicates. Therefore, I explore the distribution and properties of ser and estar in Catalan in light with the distribution and properties of pronominal and verbal copulas attested cross-linguistically.
From ser to estar
Ángel Gallego & Juan Uriagereka
UAB – U. Maryland
This paper studies the ser / estar alternation in Spanish. Following Freeze's (1992) and Kayne's (1993) analysis of Benveniste's (1960) approach to HAVE, it is argued that estar derives from ser plus the incorporation of a prepositional element. It is this prepositional element, and not some lexical property (or feature), that is responsible for the oft-noted aspectual (i.e. non-standing, perfective, stage-level) flavor of estar. Even though we focus on theser / estar cut, our analysis ultimately argues for the idea that the distinction between Individual Level and Stage Level predicates does not indicate a 'lexical' (meaning 'primitive', 'intrinsic,' or 'inherent') property of predicates. In line with recent neo-constructionist approaches to the lexicon (Borer 2005, Hale & Keyser 1993, 2002, Marantz 1997, Ramchand 2008, among others), we pursue the idea that certain properties (transitivity, lexical aspect, stativity, etc.) that were interpreted as lexical in projectionist and lexicalist models are actually the consequence of a certain syntax.
Location and the Estar/Ser Alternation
Karen Zagona
University of Washington
The first goal of my talk is to argue against the widespread view that temporal properties of predicates (perfective/imperfective; individual/stage) underlie the selection of ser versus estar as copula. Support for my claim comes from consideration of PPs, DPs and CPs with a copula, and of verbal predicates in passives and aspectual constructions with auxiliary ser/estar. This broader set of contexts shows that temporal properties do not correctly predict the distribution of ser versus estar. My second goal is to show that this broader set of contexts reveals another generalization: while estar is generally obligatory with PPs of location and temporal location (stage-level readings of AP), it is impossible with predicates of change of state or of location, or with certain other complex relations. The third goal of the talk is to show that this generalization is a syntactic one, not an inherently semantic one, and that it is due to a grammatical feature of estar. My overall conclusion is that the apparent temporal generalization with adjectival complements of estar is an artifact of a feature checking requirement of those complements, which is satisfied in constructions with copular estar, not with ser.
José Camacho Rutgers University
The distinction between the two copular verbs ser| and estar has traditionally been related to aspectual properties of the predicate or the copula. In this paper I approach a subset of the distribution of ser and estar by comparing it to the distribution of Tibetan evidentials dug, song and shag (cf. Kalsang et al., 2012, a.o.). A priori, one might thing that evidentiality (the source of evidence for one’s statement) should have very little to do with the aspectual partition of copular verbs in Spanish. However, we will see that these two categories overlap
in a striking ways, and we will attempt to develop an analysis for aspects of ser/estar that builds on insights about direct evidentials in Tibetan, particularly those of Kalsang et al. (2012). Specifically, they argue that the properties of these evidentials follows from the different inclusion relationships between situations, within a situation-semantics framework. The stage-level evidential and estar signal that the Event Situation is contained within the Information Situation, whereas the individual-level evidential and ser signals the opposite relation: the Information Situation is contained in the Event Situation. This analysis accounts for some of the aspectual properties suggested for estar, as well as the well-known evidential uses.
Ser and estar in combination with adjectives denoting human beauty: semantic and pragmatic aspects
Johan Falk
Stockholm University
This presentation is focused on the semantic values and pragmatic effects that arise from the alternation of ser and estar in combination with adjectives denoting human beauty and the contrary (guapo, bonito, lindo, hermoso; feo). The fact that predications with ser-A and estar-A is framed by general and individual norms respectively gives rise to an array of questions: Is ser-guapo and estar-guapo a case of polysemy? What does the “restrictive” or contingent value of estar mean from a semantic and pragmatic point of view? If not, how do they relate to each other semantically? Does estar-guapo entail that the subject is considered not ‘guapo’ in some sense? Pragmatically speaking, can it be offensive to say to somebody that (s)he está-guapo/a? And if so, in which circumstances? The basis of the analysis are natural examples drawn from CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) where special attention is paid to examples where both ser-A and estar-A enter into contact and to the surrounding context in order to study the pragmatic implications of uses.
Stage-Level predicates and layers of aspectuality. Ser and estar again
María J. Arche
University of Greenwich
This paper discusses how the contrast known as Individual-Level/Stage-Level, as observed in the dichotomy of Spanish copular verbs ser/estar with adjectives (Juan es/está guapo), is implemented in the grammar. In particular, the talk addresses the role of aspectual heads in the make up of the copular verbs, the level where this happens (outer aspect, inner aspect or at an even lower structural level), and the consequences of this for the temporal layout of the clause.
SER and ESTAR, and the role of semantic structure
Francesco Alessio Ursini
Macquarie University – Stockholm University
There is a general consensus that occurrence of ser and estar in sentences is determined by the semantic properties of their complement Phrases. A recent proposal on Adjectival Phrases contends that the scalar structure of APs determines whether ser or estar can occur in a sentence (Gumiel- Molina & Pérez-Jiménez, 2012). While APs denoting non-scalar structures (alto) combine with ser, APs denoting scalar structures combine with estar (cf. Kennedy & McNally, 2005). However, this proposal does not cover any data beyond APs, so it is not clear whether it can be generalized to all complement XPs. The goal of this talk is two-fold. One goal is to propose a possible discuss a possible extension of this proposal to two other types of Phrases: Prepositional Phrases (PPs), and Verbal Phrases (VPs). A second goal is to analyze whether this theory has a superior theoretical import with respect to other theories on the ser/estar alternation.
Another subvariety of states
Luis García & Diana Gómez
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
We examine the constructions formed by the copula estar and the clitic pronoun se in combination with a set of predicates like quieto (‘still’), callado (‘quiet’), acostado (‘laid down’), agachado (‘crouched’), en casa (‘at home’), etc. Some of the examples above pattern with Levin & Rappaport Hovav’s (1995) class of “maintain position sense”, i.e. verbs that describe the maintenance of a determined position by an animate and agentive entity. The set of data analysed suggests that the clitic se promotes the entity denoted by the subject to agent. Entities that can realize the role of agent are presumably restricted to those having the features [+animate] and [+volitional]. This analysis of the clitic is extended to some instances of movement verbs that also appear with it: Juan salió de la reunión a las 12 (‘John got out of the meeting at 12’ and the meeting finished at 12) vs. Juan se salió de la reunion a las 12 (‘John left the meeting at 12’ and the meeting finished later).
Sentences as predicates? The Spanish construction <ser muy de + infinitive>
Mª Jesús Fernández Leborans / Cristina Sánchez López
Complutense University of Madrid
The main goal of this work is to develop an account of the syntactic and semantic properties of the Spanish prepositonal phrases introduced by de ‘of’ functioning as gradable predicates in copular constructions with ser ‘be’, where the preposition introduces a non finite sentence, i.e. Ella es muy de ayudar a todos ‘She is very of helping everybody’. The whole construction is a characterizing sentence and the prepositional phrase denotes an individual level predicate. Our main concerns are a) the syntactic contribution of de ‘of’ to the licensing of the non finite clause as a characterizing predicate; b) the interaction between gradability and individual level predication; c) the way in which the habitual/intensive reading (Ella es muy de ayudar ‘she usually helps’/’she loves to help’) and the modal deontic reading (Su reacción es de temer ‘her reaction must be feared’) arise.
Ser and Estar: what is there to be learned and how do first-language learners learn it?
Cristina Schmitt, Carolina Holtheuer & Karen Miller
Michigan State University - Universidad de Chile - Penn State University
In this paper we articulate an acquisition model for the acquisition of ser and estar by first language learners and we back the model up with experimental results from our recent work. Because the copulas are not in a subset relation, the Semantic Subset Principle (Crain et al 1994) cannot guide the acquisition process. Rather the steps must rely on syntactic, semantic and discourse information. Step 1 is a distributional analysis and by age 2 children seem to have pretty much mastered it. Step 2 links ser to genericity. We propose that children start by linking the appearance of ser to a lack of restrictions to a specific discourse situation and to world stable characeristics. Step 3 links estar to specific topic situations, which then becomes part of the presuppositional content of estar. This step is quite delayed, given what we know from other work on acquisition of presuppositions (Karmiloff-Smith 1979; Schultz 2003). Step 4 is the adult behavior when children learn to efficiently apply Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991) and choose the appropriate copula in particular situations.
Spanish copula constructions with adjectives: What monolingual, bilingual and trilingual acquisition tell us about the syntactic derivation of SER and ESTAR
Laia Arnaus Gil
Bergische Universität Wuppertal
A syntactic proposal for Spanish copular verbs (e.g. Remberger & González-Vilbazo 2007) is able to capture partially the aspectual differences between IL/SL predicates (Carlson 1977) in sentences like Tomás es/está guapoILP/SLP. Yet, it fails to explain the same distinction in other contexts in which only one is allowed (Luís es/*está inteligenteILP, Sofía *es/está contentaSLP). For these last contexts, copula selection might take place before syntax, i.e. at the lexical level. In a nutshell, a lexical and a syntactic copula selection will be proposed: Adjectives like inteligenteILP and contentaSLP receive the corresponding property lexically (i.e. lexical adjectives). As for the second group, the SL property is also lexicalized and thus inserted in the head position of TP. By contrast, the assignment of an IL quality will require the incorporation of SER in the syntactic derivation under Vº. In a head-complement relation between SER in V° and its adjective in AP, the former will assign the IL property to the predicate (i.e. lexical-syntactic adjectives).
The longitudinal and cross-sectional data of 39 monolingual, bilingual and trilingual children (2;0-6;5) show that they distinguish between those two groups of adjectives. In short, lexical adjectives are generally accompanied by the respective target-like Spanish copula verb. The lexical-syntactic adjectives show more target deviant productions. These are concentrated on SER-contexts.
Origins and development of Spanish estar + past participle
Cristina Sánchez Marco & Rafael Marín
UPF - CNRS
So far it has been assumed that most uses of Spanish estar arise some time later than ser, and that the former eventually takes over most uses of the latter. Previous analyses of change in estar claim that this construction generalizes its usage as a result of some reanalysis or grammaticalization change, presumably taking over result state and locative uses of ser.
In this talk we want to go one step further and investigate the questions of how estar + participle emerges in Old Spanish, and how it extends its usage taking over ser, based on the empirical analysis of data coming from a large-scale corpus of Spanish containing texts from the 12th to the 20th century. The idea we want to argue for is that the first and more frequent uses of estar determine the way the participial construction emerges and further extends taking over ser, and that the mechanism which drives this development is analogy. Specifically, we want to argue that this development is driven by the analogical relations established between participles appearing with this verb and locative prepositional modifiers.
Different ways of being polite: aspectual composition in Spanish ser and estar sentences
Yuko Morimoto - Mª Victoria Pavón Lucero
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
We will try to demonstrate that coercion is not involved in cases like No has estado muy cortés (‘You have not been very polite’) or ¡Sé valiente! (‘Be brave!’), in which two alleged individual level (IL) predicates, the adjectives valiente and cortés, are interpreted as stage level (SL) predicates. We defend that the IL-SL distinction is not encoded exclusively at the lexical level. Adjectives like valiente or cortés belong to a class of predicates that are lexically undetermined with respect to that distinction (see Dowty 1979, for an interesting discussion concerning the so-called “agentive” adjectives and predicate nominals in examples like be polite or be a hero), and they achieve an IL or SL interpretation depending on the syntactic or discursive context in which they appear. So, we will propose that IL-SL opposition is a matter of aspectual composition which can take place at different levels of derivation: lexical, syntactic and pragmatic-discursive.
ESTAR HAS BE
Cristina Real Puigdollers
UAB
This paper proposes a compositional analysis of the ser and estar system in Catalan, and ultimately its differences with Spanish and Portuguese. I propose that estar comes from the verb have plus a preposition of location. I sustain with classical compositional approaches of have (Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993) that have is the verb be plus a preposition of possession or central coincidence. At the same time, I consider that the simple copulative verb be is a pronominal element, following Postma (1993). Thus, I explore the hypothesis that ser-copula is just a type of pronominal copular. This hypothesis allows us to relate the discussion about ser/estar with the study of pronominal and verbal copulas cross-linguistically (Adger and Ramchand 2003; Citko 2008). According to Citko (2008) pronominal and verbal copulas have different syntactic properties: while verbal copulas might select DPs, APs and PPs and form predicational interpretations, pronominal copulas normally select DPs and might be specificational or predicational, but only for inherent properties, namely, individual stage predicates. Therefore, I explore the distribution and properties of ser and estar in Catalan in light with the distribution and properties of pronominal and verbal copulas attested cross-linguistically.
From ser to estar
Ángel Gallego & Juan Uriagereka
UAB – U. Maryland
This paper studies the ser / estar alternation in Spanish. Following Freeze's (1992) and Kayne's (1993) analysis of Benveniste's (1960) approach to HAVE, it is argued that estar derives from ser plus the incorporation of a prepositional element. It is this prepositional element, and not some lexical property (or feature), that is responsible for the oft-noted aspectual (i.e. non-standing, perfective, stage-level) flavor of estar. Even though we focus on theser / estar cut, our analysis ultimately argues for the idea that the distinction between Individual Level and Stage Level predicates does not indicate a 'lexical' (meaning 'primitive', 'intrinsic,' or 'inherent') property of predicates. In line with recent neo-constructionist approaches to the lexicon (Borer 2005, Hale & Keyser 1993, 2002, Marantz 1997, Ramchand 2008, among others), we pursue the idea that certain properties (transitivity, lexical aspect, stativity, etc.) that were interpreted as lexical in projectionist and lexicalist models are actually the consequence of a certain syntax.
Location and the Estar/Ser Alternation
Karen Zagona
University of Washington
The first goal of my talk is to argue against the widespread view that temporal properties of predicates (perfective/imperfective; individual/stage) underlie the selection of ser versus estar as copula. Support for my claim comes from consideration of PPs, DPs and CPs with a copula, and of verbal predicates in passives and aspectual constructions with auxiliary ser/estar. This broader set of contexts shows that temporal properties do not correctly predict the distribution of ser versus estar. My second goal is to show that this broader set of contexts reveals another generalization: while estar is generally obligatory with PPs of location and temporal location (stage-level readings of AP), it is impossible with predicates of change of state or of location, or with certain other complex relations. The third goal of the talk is to show that this generalization is a syntactic one, not an inherently semantic one, and that it is due to a grammatical feature of estar. My overall conclusion is that the apparent temporal generalization with adjectival complements of estar is an artifact of a feature checking requirement of those complements, which is satisfied in constructions with copular estar, not with ser.