Verbos que expresan acciones intermedias o incompletas

Abstract

This article deals with the grammatical properties of Spanish verbs such as entornar ‘half-close, leave ajar’, adormilarse ‘doze off’ or entrever ‘glimpse, guess’, which denote ac-tions or processes that, despite being telic, involve actions characterized by not leading to others that are supposedly expected, as well as carried out in a partial or incomplete way. Section 2 introduces some historical and dialectal aspects of this group of verbs; section 3 deals with verbs in this class that are morphologically marked by some prefix (entre-, medio-, cuasi-, among others), as well as some adjectives that express similar meanings. In the final section, a solution is proposed for the aspectual paradox posed by the fact that the verbs examined reject adverbs of completeness (del todo ‘in full’, por completo ‘completely’, enteramente ‘fully, enterely’) in spite of being telic, a quite unusual property among accom-plishments.