When estar is not there: A cross-linguistic analysis of individual/stage-level copular sentences in Romance

Abstract

This article studies how Romance languages encode the individual-level (IL)/stage-level (SL) aspectual distinction in the domain of non-verbal predication. To this end, attributive copular clauses are considered, and those languages that mark the IL/SL paradigm by means of two different copulas (ser and estar ‘to be’, such as Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese) are compared with mono-copular languages (such as French, Italian, and Romanian). On the basis of recent developments in the study of the IL/SL contrast and Spanish copulas, I propose that SL-ness is encoded in non-verbal SL-predicates as an uninterpretable instance of a [Stage] feature and that SL-copular sentences are derived by virtue of an agreement operation between the predicate and an Asp head that carries an interpretable instance of [Stage], which is realised as estar in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. The conclusion is that the inventory of aspectual elements is the same across Romance languages, which differ one from another with respect to the presence of an SL-copula (namely, estar).

Keywords

• ser
• estar
• copulas
• individual-level
• stage-level
• aspectual agreement