RASAL Lingüística

Issue 2024 - Vol. 2
Dossier

Aspect in the determination of scales of comparison

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  • Guadalupe Herrera,
  • José María Oliver
Guadalupe Herrera
Instituto de Filología y Literaturas Hispánicas Amado Alonso//Universidad Nacional de La Plata
José María Oliver
IFLH, UBA / IdIHCS, UNLP - CONICET
Portada del número 2014 vol. 2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56683/rs242043

Published 2024-09-28

Keywords

  • verbal comparatives,
  • scales of comparison,
  • grammatical aspect,
  • monotonicity

How to Cite

Herrera, G., & Oliver, J. M. (2024). Aspect in the determination of scales of comparison. RASAL Lingüística, (2), 173–199. https://doi.org/10.56683/rs242043

Copyright (c) 2024 Guadalupe Herrera, José María Oliver

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In this paper, we address the effect grammatical aspect has on the determination of scales of comparison in Spanish verbal comparative constructions. On the basis of previous studies on the semantics of these constructions, we focus on non-canonical verbal comparatives with atelic events expressed in the past tense perfective and imperfective, as in Juan corrió/corría más que María. From observations made on languages such as English, recent literature argues that the scale of comparison is restricted to certain dimensions by the notion of monotonicity. However, in the interpretation of the Spanish constructions studied here, several scales of comparison seem to be available, including some that escape this restriction. By means of a survey study of native speakers’ judgments, it was confirmed that the perfective/imperfective alternation does influence the availability of scales of comparison, giving rise, in some cases, to unpredicted scales or scales which are not necessarily monotonic.

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