Ser y estar con adjetivosafinidad y desajustes de rasgos

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to argue that the combination of copulas and adjectives (and their interpretive properties) is not subject to a single principle of grammatical selection; rather, it is the result of a complex network of relations among grammatical features, whose affinities and mismatches can explain the distribution and interpretive effects found in discourse. When estar (which presupposes the spatio-temporal anchoring of the predication to a reference situation) is combined with an individual-level adjective Pi (which lacks anchoring properties), a mismatch arises that is systematically solved by inferring a direct experience situation to which the predication is linked (i.e., a direct evidence interpretation). To illustrate this view, three aspects of the estar+Pi combination are analysed: the discursive commitments it triggers, its impossibility to co-occur with the conjectural future, and its degree of markedness depending on the subclass of the adjective. All these data provide arguments for a more articulated account of the semantics/pragmatics interface.