Innovative copular sentences in American Spanish
Spanish has a bicopular system, where the copula ser (‘be-ser’) expresses individual-level predications (1), whereas the copula estar (‘be-estar’) expresses stage-level predications, where stages of the subject are compared with respect to the property (2). Examples includes aesthetic adjectives: (1) …y eso no cambia, Cuba es bella naturalmente, sus culturas, sus creencias, su tradición, sus comidas típicas… (CU, blogcip.cu) (2) …planificado para 7 meses, se ejecutó en 8 meses, una espera que realmente valió la pena porque nuestra Plaza Bolívar está más bella que nunca, para darle una mejor cara a la ciudad… (VE, alcaldiadevalencia.gob.ve) In American Spanish varieties (except in the Rioplatense area) estar-sentences have an additional ‘innovative’ use, (3). In innovative examples, stages of the subject are not compared. These examples express a perspectivized assertion: the attribution of the property to the subject at the speech-time is presented as a subjective judgment of the speaker. (3) el poema que más le gustó fue El cuarteto de Pompeya que habla del amor carnal entre un hombre y una mujer, porque está sumamente bello el poema, amén de erótico, pero a lo que me refiero es a la belleza con que Morábito trata una cuestión erótica… (Mx, diarioavanzada.com.mx) Aesthetic adjectives are considered to be the third most frequently found class in this context (behind age and size adjectives), however, they have not received a specific study. The talk offers brand-new data comparing the frequency and extension of aesthetic adjectives in standard vs. innovative estar sentences in the different varieties of American Spanish. Naturalistic data including the adjectives bello, bonito, feo, guapo, hermoso, horrible, precioso (‘beautiful, pretty, ugly, good-looking, handsome, beautiful, horrible, beautiful’) has been obtained from the American Spanish Web 2011 (esamTenTen11) corpus using the Sketch Engine tool. From the theoretical point of view, the paper aims to explain the occurrence of aesthetic adjectives in standard vs. innovative predications with estar, as well as the relevance found of the semantic type of subject of predication in obtaining a perspectivized judgment, on the grounds of the proposal developed in Gumiel-Molina, Moreno-Quibén and Pérez-Jiménez (2020), according to which, innovative estar sentences contain adjectives with an experiencer in their argument structure. The geographically conditioned argument augmentation of certain classes of adjectives results in perspectivized predications with estar, since the experiencer is the entity that provides stages to be compared, as required by the copula.