Lexical–Syntactic Classes of Adjectives in Copular Sentences across Spanish Varieties: The Innovative Use of Estar

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a clearer understanding of the structure known in the literature as the innovative use of estar, illustrated in sentences like Luego salgo/voy a visitar usuarios que están muy morosos [Medellín, Colombia; Preseea] (“Today I am going to visit users that are_.ESTAR defaulting debtors”). In such sentences, no comparison is established between stages or counterparts of the subject of predication with regard to the property expressed by the adjective, as opposed to estar-sentences in standard/general Spanish. This innovative structure is a syntactic scheme employed throughout different Latin American Spanish varieties. The goal of this paper is twofold: it is both descriptive and theoretical. From a descriptive perspective, it offers an exhaustive and updated empirical characterization of the extent of this structure in Latin American Spanish based on an analysis of the Preseea corpus. This description takes into consideration both its geographical distribution in the different Latin American dialectal varieties and the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives that appear as predicates in innovative estar-sentences. Building on this, from a theoretical point of view, a critical evaluation is made of the existing proposals in the literature that explain the properties—both syntactic and semantic—of the innovative construction.

1. Introduction

In this paper, we focus on the structure known in the literature as the innovative use of estar (Silva-Corvalán 1986), illustrated in the following example from Mexican Spanish: E: ¿Y cómo era la fábrica? ¿estaba grande? I: Estaba grande, sí, estaba grande (“And what was._SER the factory like? Was._ESTAR it big? I: Yes, it was._ESTAR big.”, Mexico, MONR_M21_044, Preseea; all the examples in this article have been extracted from the Preseea corpus). The innovative use of estar is a syntactic pattern that is widely attested in Latin American Spanish and is considered by Malaver (2009, p. 97) as a syntactic Americanism: a syntactic schema that can be found in the speech of urban areas in at least two or more Latin American countries (according to Company’s 2006, 26 definition). As a descriptive label, we will call the geolectal varieties where this structure is possible innovative varieties.

In innovative estar-structures, no comparison is established between stages or counterparts of the subject of predication with regards to the property expressed by the adjective following the copula. In this sense, innovative structures are different from general or standard1 copular sentences with estar, as is illustrated in: Han reformado la fábrica, y ahora está muy grande, muy espaciosa (“The factory has been renovated and is_.ESTAR now very big, very spacious”), where two temporal stages of the subject la fábrica “the factory” are compared regarding size. Several authors (Gutiérrez 1994, a.o.) have noticed that the crucial aspect of the meaning of innovative estar-structures is to express the subjective point of view of the speaker about the attribution of a particular quality to an entity.

Most of the studies that analyze innovative estar-sentences in different varieties of Spanish explain their existence as the result of the modification of some semantic properties of the copula estar of general Spanish, or as linked to the generalization of pragmatic mechanisms that apply in a more restricted way in copular sentences in general Spanish. Against this type of proposals, focused on the semantic–pragmatic properties of estar in innovative varieties, Gumiel-Molina et al. (2020) and Moreno-Quibén (2022) argue that the lexical–syntactic properties of adjectives are crucial to understanding this pattern of syntactic variation. In this context, the aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to demonstrate that the lexical–syntactic classes to which adjectives belong are relevant to understanding the syntactic and semantic properties of the innovative estar-construction as well as its geographical distribution across Latin American Spanish varieties, and (b) to explore the theoretical consequences of this fact. Thus, to affirm the relevance of the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives to explain the differences between the general/standard copular structures and the innovative estar-sentences, we offer an exhaustive and updated characterization of the extent of this structure in Latin American Spanish, considering both its geographical distribution in the different American dialectal varieties and the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives that appear as predicates in innovative estar-sentences. Our study will be based on an empirical analysis of the Preseea corpus. We conclude that there is a significant difference in the occurrence of the various lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives in the innovative estar-construction both within each dialectal area and across dialectal areas of Latin American Spanish. From a theoretical perspective, in light of the generalizations established, a critical evaluation will be made of the existing proposals in the literature that explain the existence and properties—both syntactic and semantic—of the innovative structure. We claim that only those proposals that consider the lexical–syntactic properties of adjectives as subject to dialectal variation can account for the paradigm described.

In order to achieve these goals, this article first goes on to address the pertinent literature to establish the theoretical framework in which the study has been undertaken. Key terms such as general/standard and innovative use of estar-sentences (estar+ Adjectival Phrase) are also defined. This subsequent section also addresses a literature review that examines the dialectal distribution of innovative use and its grammatical properties. In Section 3, the methodological underpinnings of the present study are presented. In Section 4, the results are presented in relation to the key parameters under investigation, i.e., geographical distribution and lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives. In Section 5, the results are discussed and statistically supported. In Section 6, the proposals made in the related literature to explain the use of estar are revisited as a means of discussing their adequacy to explain the general trends highlighted in the previous section. In Section 7, the final conclusions drawn are presented.

2. The Distribution of <ser/estar + Adjectival Phrase> across Spanish Varieties. General/Standard and Innovative Uses

As has long been established, general Spanish or standard Spanish has two copular verbs, which can be combined with adjectival predicates: ser “be._SER” and estar “be._ESTAR”. In Section 2.1 we describe the combination patterns of the copulas ser and estar with adjectival predicates characteristic of general/standard Spanish. In Section 2.2 we describe the innovative use of <estar + Adjectival Phrase>. We will base our description on the lexical–semantic–syntactic classes of adjectives established in Demonte (1999a, 1999b, 2011), apud Dixon (1982):

• Qualifying adjectives: the following subclasses have been considered:

  (a)

  Dimensional adjectives: adjectives expressing dimensional properties of entities such as length, height, width, thickness, etc., excluding age (alto “tall”, ancho, “wide”, grueso “thick”, largo “long”, etc.). Dimensional adjectives take measure phrases (5 metros de largo “5 m long”).

  (b)

  Age adjectives: express the chronological age of an animate entity (chavo “little”, joven “young”, pequeño “little”, viejo “old”, etc.).

  (c)

  Property adjectives: non-dimensional adjectives expressing physical or abstract properties of entities (duro “hard”, triste “sad” …—in this paper, subclasses of property adjectives will not be considered, although emotional adjectives also have an evaluative component). Adjectives expressing degrees of price or temperature were included in this class (barato “cheap”, costoso “expensive”, caliente “hot”, etc.).

  (d)

  Color adjectives (blanco “white”, negro “black”, etc.).

  (e)

  Evaluative adjectives: macro-class that includes various subclasses with different syntactic–semantic properties (Demonte 1999a, 1999b, 2011; McNally and Stojanovic 2015; Liao et al. 2016; Moreno-Quibén 2022; Gumiel-Molina et al. 2023). Evaluative adjectives give rise to scalar variation.

  • Extreme-degree adjectives (bárbaro “awesome”, terrible “horrible”), which express a very high positive or negative general evaluation of an entity, not necessarily linked to a specific parameter (vs. the following subclasses).
  • Aesthetic adjectives (bello “beautiful”, guapo “handsome”, lindo “cute, beautiful“…), which express the aesthetic value of an entity.
  • Predicates of personal taste (sabroso, rico “tasty” …), which express evaluation involving direct physical contact with the entity expressed by the subject of predication (i.e., through smelling, eating, or drinking).
  • Predicates of personal judgment (difícil “difficult”), which express evaluation of entities not involving physical contact.
  • “Other”: This class accommodates other evaluative adjectives that do not fit neatly into the above classes because of their meaning or syntactic behavior. Many of the adjectives grouped in this heterogeneous class only co-occur with ser in copulative sentences in general Spanish (e.g., conflictivo “conflictive”, significativo “significant”, importante “important”, recto “upright”—which is a moral predicate in the sense of Stojanovic and McNally (2022).

• Relational, circumstance or adverbial and modal adjectives.
  As Demonte (1999b) points out, some adjectives in these classes can be used as predicates: El queso brie es francés “Brie cheese is._SER French”; Esa publicación no es periódica “This publication is._SER not a regular one”; La victoria es posible “Victory is._SER possible”. They are combined with ser in general Spanish. See also RAE-ASALE (2009, p. 37.9b,c).

2.1. <ser/estar + Adjectival Phrase> in General/Standard Spanish

Qualifying adjectives can generally be combined with both copulas, as is illustrated below (1).

(1)	a.	Físicamente	mi	esposo	es	gordito,	es	alto
		physically	my	husband	is.SER	chubby	is.SER	tall
		Physically, my husband is chubby, he’s tall. (Colombia, CALI_M21_041)
	b.	Ella	está	desarrollando	y	está	alta
		she	is.ESTAR	developing	and	is.ESTAR	tall
		She is growing and is tall (now). (Cuba, LHAB_M22_055)

To explain the difference between the copular structures (1a) and (1b), all the existing proposals have resorted in one way or another to the distinction between individual and stage-level predications, regardless of the theoretical implementation of this difference (this is, in fact, the distinction used in contemporary traditional grammar to explain the differences between copulative sentences with ser and with estar, cf. RAE-ASALE 2009, p. 37.7; see also Marín 2004, 2016, for a description of the general/standard use of the Spanish copulas within an aspectual approach). Theoretical proposals based on modes of comparison, such as the one developed by Gumiel-Molina et al. (2015a, 2015b), argue that the attribution of a gradable property to an entity in a copular sentence is always based on a (implicit or explicit) comparison to other entities (see also Crespo 1946; Bolinger 1947; Roldán 1974; Falk 1979; Franco and Steinmetz 1983, 1986; Bazaco 2017; Sánchez-Alonso 2018).

According to Gumiel-Molina et al. (2015a), the sentences in (1a) and (1b) differ in the class of semantic entities regarding which the comparison is made (comparison class). With ser, (1a), the comparison class consists of other individuals with which the referent of the subject (mi esposo, “my husband”) shares some characteristic (e.g., being a 40-year-old man); thus, (1a) is true if the subject exceeds the average height calculated for that class (comparison between individuals X-Y). In contrast, with estar, (1b), the comparison class refers to alternative counterparts/stages of the subject; thus, (1b) could be true or false depending on the comparison of the stage s of the subject with a degree Xⁿ of the property at the time of assertion with a previous or alternative (non-factual) stage s’ of the same individual with a degree X^j of the property (comparison within the individual Xⁿ-X^j).

This type of proposal explains the systematic difference in meaning found in general Spanish between ser- and estar-sentences when qualifying adjectives appear as predicates (c.f. Gumiel-Molina et al. 2021, Section 4.2.3 for some apparent exceptions to this generalization). Furthermore, it explains that participial and perfective adjectives combine only with estar (Juan está harto/borrracho “Juan is._ESTAR fed up/drunk”). This is because they lexically express a state resulting from a previous event affecting the subject of the predication so that counterparts of the subject must be necessarily taken into account in order to consider the sentence true or false. Also, non-qualifying adjectives used as predicates combine with ser, for instance, relational adjectives, adverbial adjectives, etc., e.g., El pasaporte es italiano “The passport is._SER Italian”; La revista es seminal, “The magazine is_.SER weekly”, since they are sortal predicates that express a defining property, i.e., a property salient enough to define an individual as a particular member of a class (c.f. Gumiel-Molina et al. 2015a; Roy 2013). This is also the case with modal adjectives like posible “possible” and evidente “evident” (RAE-ASALE 2009, p. 379b, c)

Although the combination of most qualifying adjectives (dimensional adjectives –alto “tall”, delgado “thin”–, property adjectives including dispositional ones –triste “sad”, blando “soft”, generoso “generous”–, color adjectives –blanco “white”–, etc., cf. RAE-ASALE 2009, p. 37.9d, f, l) with ser and estar obeys the systematic pattern of meaning alternation that has just been described, some clarifications should be added in relation to age adjectives and evaluative adjectives.

2.1.1. Age Adjectives

The combination of age adjectives with ser and estar in Spanish is complex and has not been fully explained in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. Descriptively speaking, as stated in RAE-ASALE (2009, p. 37.9t), in general/standard Spanish, these adjectives combine with ser to express chronological age: En su carnet pone que tiene 16/103 años, así que es joven/viejo “His ID card says he is 16/103 years old, so he is_.SER young/old”. When combined with estar, they express some property associated with age. A sentence like Juan tiene 50 años pero está mayor/viejo “Juan is 50 years old but looks older, Lit. is_.ESTAR old”, expresses clumsiness or physical weakness, slowness or lack of reflexes, or aged appearance. Similarly, Juan tiene cincuenta años pero está mayor/joven para escalar “Juan is fifty years old but is._ESTAR (too) old/young to climb”, expresses age (in)adequacy to perform an action. Considering this description of the standard/general combination of age adjectives with estar, other possible patterns departing from it will be considered as innovative uses, as in the following examples Yo tenía seis años, P. habrá tenido cuatro, o sea, estaba chiquito (“I was six years old, P. must have been four, I mean, he was a little kid”, Lit. he was._ESTAR little”; Perú, LIMA_M23_042); [Speaking of the birth of their children] porque recuérdate que el otro nació cuando nosotros estábamos grandes (“Because remember that the other one was born when we were._ESTAR grown up” Lit. “…we were._ESTAR big”, Venezuela, CARA_M33_103). In these examples, the predicate of the estar-sentence is an age adjective (chiquito, grande) exclusively expressing chronological age.

2.1.2. Evaluative Adjectives

Evaluative adjectives form a macro-class whose subclasses behave differently in combination with ser and estar in standard Spanish. Evaluative aesthetic adjectives give rise to the general contrast between ser- and estar-sentences: Ana es hermosa (“Ana is._SER beautiful”); Ana estaba hermosa ayer en la boda (“Ana was._ESTAR beautiful yesterday at the wedding) (cf. RAE-ASALE 2009, p. 37.7c).

However, some evaluative adjectives also give rise to a judge-oriented reading in general Spanish. This is the case with predicates of personal taste, (2) (rico, sabroso “tasty”). In this example, there is no comparison between counterparts of the subject of predication regarding the property expressed by the adjective. However, this sentence does express a comparison within an individual. As claimed recurrently in the literature, these evaluative adjectives have an experiencer argument as part of their argument structure, which may be syntactically implicit or explicit: rico para X, “tasty for X” (Lasersohn 2011, 2012; Pearson 2013; Bylinina 2014, 2017). Gumiel-Molina et al. (2020, 2023) and Moreno-Quibén (2022) claim that this argument provides the necessary counterparts to form the within-the-individual comparison class in estar-sentences. The comparison is thus established between the evaluation of the property that the experiencer makes in the sentence evaluation index and an alternative evaluation that a counterpart of the experiencer might make in a different evaluation index. Given that the experiencer is by default coindexed with the speaker, the sentence expresses a perspectivized assertion, a subjective judgment of the speaker expressing his or her point of view on the attribution of the property. Examples like (2) below are dubbed in the literature as evidential estar-sentences (Franco and Steinmetz 1983; Roby 2009); this label is compatible with the explanation just outlined if it is assumed that adjectives of personal taste require that the experiencer has an experiential contact with the entity to which the subject refers.

(2)	ese	[queso]	está	muy	rico
	that	chesse	isESTAR	very	tasty
		That cheese is really tasty. (México, MONR_M12_022)

Predicates of personal judgment (fácil “easy”, difícil “difficult”, divertido “fun”, etc.) also have an experiencer/judge2 argument—fácil/difícil/divertido para X—(Hartman 2011, 2012; Bylinina 2014, 2017; McNally and Stojanovic 2015) and show a similar reading in estar-sentences, (3). In (3), the subject expresses a situation in which the experiencer/judge participates (Franco and Steinmetz 1983; Roby 2009).

(3)	a. [Context: Speaking of the impossibility of finding a job]
	E: en	cualquier	lugar		encuentras	trabajo (…)
	in	any	place		find.2.SG.PRES	job
	I: pues no/	no	está		fácil
	well, no	not	is.3.SG.ESTAR		easy
	You can find a job anywhere? no, it is not easy [to find a job]. (México, MEXI_H21_090)
	b. [Context: Talking about Christmas plans]
	debe	de	estar	re divertido		salir	un veinticuatro
	must	of	be.ESTAR	super fun		going out	on 24th [December]
It must be fun going out on Christmas Eve. (Uruguay, MONV_M12_020)

However, the behavior of personal judgment adjectives in ser/estar sentences is complex, in ways unexplored in the literature. First, some lexical items cannot be combined with estar in at least some varieties, for example Peninsular Spanish: Realizar aquel encargo fue/*estuvo duro “Carrying out that task was_.SER/*ESTAR hard”, Escuchar sus palabras fue/*estuvo muy fuerte “Listening to his words was_.SER/*ESTAR really hard”. Second, for other lexical items in this class, the combination with the copula interferes with tough-movement, and there are grammaticality differences between the variants with and without tough-movement: Construir aquel muro estuvo (fácil/divertido/complicado/interesante/^??/*sencillo) “Building that wall was._ESTAR easy, fun, complicated, interesting, ^??/* simple”, ^??/*Aquel muro estuvo fácil/divertido/complicado/interesante/sencillo de construir “That wall was._ESTAR easy, fun, complicated, interesting, simple to build” (sentences with ser are grammatical in both cases). In this article, we will not attempt to explain this behavior; suffice it to say that, as we will see below, Spanish varieties differ as to the classes of subjects that are accepted in estar sentences with predicates of personal judgment.

Finally, extreme-degree adjectives (maravilloso “awesome”, espectacular “spectacular”) have also been claimed to have an experiencer/judge argument that provides counterparts to form a within-an-individual comparison class in estar-sentences (Bylinina 2014, 2017). In (4a), the subject takes part in a structured event (a show) in which the experiencer/judge has a certain role (viewer). In (4b), the subject expresses a situation in which the experiencer/judge participates. Other similar examples (with structured events as subjects) are La fiesta estuvo fantástica “The party was_.ESTAR fantastic” and La boda estuvo horrible “The wedding was_.ESTAR awful” (cf. Gumiel-Molina et al. 2015a; RAE-ASALE 2009, p. 37.9d). Also, in these cases, the comparison is established between the evaluation of the property that the experiencer/judge makes regarding the entity in the sentence evaluation index and an alternative evaluation that a counterpart of the experiencer/judge might make in a different evaluation index. It must be acknowledged that the kinds of semantic entities that can appear as subjects in these sentences are complex and will not be dealt with in this paper; see Escribano Roca (2023) for further information on this topic.

(4)	a. [Context: Talking about a just-released show]
	el			cuerpo	de	baile	estaba	espectacular
	the			corps	de	ballet	was.3.SG.ESTAR	spectacular
		The corps de ballet was spectacular. (Cuba, LHAB_M13_079)
		b. E: aprendés bastante porque //te enseñan a a construir tu propia casa ah (…)
		E: you learn a lot because//they teach you how to build your own house ah
	I: claro		está		bárbaro	está	genial	eso
	I: of course		is.3.SG.ESTAR		awesome	is.3.SG.ESTAR	cool	that
		Of course, it [learning how to build your own house] is awesome, it is cool (Uruguay, MONV_H11_035)

2.2. Innovative <Estar + Adjectival Phrase>

It is important to note that the consideration of an example as general/standard or as innovative is based on the compositional meaning of the structure estar + AP, and not on the lexical choice of the adjective, which can be restricted to a specific variety. For example, the adjective padre (“very good, very funny, of good quality”, Diccionario del español de México, COLMEX, https://dem.colmex.mx/, accessed on 16 August 2023) is restricted to Mexico, but an example such as the following illustrates the general/standard use of estar-sentences, parallel to (4): …y me gusta porque, no sé, es verano y el clima está súper padre “…and I like it because, I don’t know, it’s summer and the weather is._ESTAR really cool” (México, MXLI_M13_029). Similarly, the adjective patuleco is restricted to some American varieties with the meaning of “(applied to people) person who limps or walks defectively”. However, the following example must be considered as part of general/standard Spanish since counterparts of the subject of predication are compared with the property in question: Últimamente, como yo estoy media patuleca y… no ando <observacion_complementaria=“se refiere a su pérdida de agilidad producto de la edad”> “Lately, as I’ve been a bit clumsy and… I don’t walk <supplementary_observation=“refers to her loss of agility due to age”>“ (Chile, SCHI_M33_103). The innovative use of estar must be considered a case of syntactic variation, regardless of whether adjectival predicates are subject also to lexical variation.

In this work, when referring to the innovative use of estar or innovative estar-sentences, we refer to structures like those exemplified in (5) and (6) below, which differ in their semantic and grammatical properties from those described in Section 2.1 as part of general/standard Spanish.

(5)	E: ¿Y	cómo	era	la	fábrica?	¿Estaba	grande?
	and	how	was. 3.SG.SER	the	factory?	was.3.SG.ESTAR	big?
	I: Estaba	grande,	sí	estaba	grande
	was.3.SG.ESTAR	big	yes	was. 3.SG..ESTAR	big
E: And what was the factory like? Was it big?, I: It was big, yes, it was big. (México MONR_M21_044)

(6)	luego	salgo/	voy	a	visitar	usuarios	que	están
	then	go-out.1.SG	go.1.SG	to	visit	users	that	are.3.PL.ESTAR
	muy	morosos/	voy a	hacer	cobros			(note)
	very	defaulting.MASC.PL	go to	make	collections
Today I am going out; I am going to visit users who are defaulting debtors; I am going to collect invoices. (MEDE_H22_002, Medellín, Colombia)

For example, in (5), a stage of the factory is not compared with alternative, previous or possible, stages of the factory regarding the property expressed by the dimensional adjective (size adjective), contrary to what happens in an example like (1b). In addition, this kind of adjective lacks, in general Spanish, an experiencer/judge argument that could provide counterparts to form a comparison within the individual, as would be the case with evaluative adjectives. Similarly, in (6) the sentence does not express a comparison of stages of the subject of predication with regards to the property denoted by the property adjective. Since moroso “defaulting (debtor)” is not an evaluative adjective (and thus lacks an experiencer argument), a meaning parallel to the one obtained in (2)–(4) is not possible in general/standard Spanish. Therefore, (5) and (6) are examples illustrating the innovative use of estar-sentences (these examples are judged as ungrammatical in Peninsular Spanish).

The main semantic characteristic of these structures is that they present the attribution of the property to the subject as a subjective judgment of the speaker, expressing his or her point of view on the predication at the time of assertion (Gutiérrez 1994; García-Márkina 2013; Sánchez-Alonso et al. 2016; Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Gumiel-Molina et al. 2020, 2023; Moreno-Quibén 2022).3

As it has been pointed out in different works (Gutiérrez 1992; De Jonge 1993a, 1993b; Ortiz-López 2000; Cortés-Torres 2004; Malaver 2009, 2012a, 2012b; Díaz-Campos and Geeslin 2011; Alfaraz 2012; Brown and Cortés-Torres 2012; Juárez-Cummings 2014; García-Márkina 2013; Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Sánchez-Alonso et al. 2016, 2019; Moreno-Quibén 2022; Gumiel-Molina et al. 2020, 2023), the extension of the innovative structure with estar differs in the distinct varieties of Spanish both from a geographical distribution perspective and in terms of the kinds of adjectival predicates that appear in it. On the one hand, innovative estar-sentences have been documented systematically in Mexican Spanish, and less systematically in the varieties spoken in Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Peru. It is not attested in the Rioplatense area (nor in European Spanish, although Malaver 2009 provides examples of the Andalusian variety).

On the other hand, it has been observed that not all lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives appear in the innovative structure. For instance, Gutiérrez (1994), Cortés-Torres (2004) and García-Márkina (2013) point to the existence of the following hierarchy in the frequency of appearance of the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives in the innovative estar-structure in Mexican Spanish: age adjectives (joven, chiquito “young”) > size adjectives (grande “big”) > evaluative adjectives expressing beauty (aesthetic predicates, guapo “handsome”, lindo, bello “beautiful”).

However, there is certain inconsistency regarding other lexical classes of adjectives in the innovative structure, namely non-dimensional adjectives expressing physical properties, or they are unattested, e.g., color adjectives. Similar generalizations are established in Ortiz-López (2000) and Brown and Cortés-Torres (2012) for Puerto Rican Spanish and in Alfaraz (2012) for Cuban Spanish. Moreno-Quibén (2022, chp. 4) reaches similar conclusions from an analysis of the Preseea corpus based on the analysis of a predetermined list of adjectives belonging to different lexical–syntactic classes in copular estar-sentences. Highlighting an intuitive generalization, Gutiérrez (1994, p. 79) pointed out that the adjectives that appear preferentially in the innovative construction are those that express properties for whose attribution the speaker has the norm of evaluation.

In this context, as outlined in the introduction, the descriptive aim of this article is to offer an exhaustive and updated characterization of the extent of the innovative estar-structure in Latin American Spanish, considering simultaneously both its geographical distribution in the different dialectal varieties and the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives that appear in it. To this end, an empirical study has been carried out based on the Preseea corpus as is described in the following section.

3. Methodology of the Corpus Study

To characterize the extent of the innovative estar-structure in American Spanish with a focus on the distribution of different lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives, a database based on Preseea was compiled. Preseea is a corpus of spoken Spanish representative of large urban centers in the Hispanic world, suitable for studying geographical and social varieties. A sample of the corpus is accessible on the web at https://preseea.uah.es/, accessed on 15 June 2023. Access is provided to semi-directed oral interviews—18 interviews per city with their corresponding transcriptions, produced by male and female speakers of three age groups (20–34; 35–54; 55+) and three levels of education (low, medium, high) (Moreno Fernández 2021).

In this study, the Latin American cities listed below have been focused on, which were grouped according to the Latin American dialectal areas established by Moreno Fernández (2019, a.o), RAE-ASALE (2009), Malaver (2022), and Orozco (2022), while we are aware of the need to review the generally accepted dialectal areas when analyzing strictly grammatical phenomena (Fernández-Ordóñez 2022). The Mexican variety and the Central American varieties are considered as members of a single dialectal area in Moreno Fernández (2009), Moreno Fernández and Otero Roth (2016) and RAE-ASALE (2009), although they appear as separate dialectal areas in Moreno Fernández (2019). The scarcity of examples from the only Central American country represented in Preseea (Guatemala, 122,478 words) has determined that we adopt the Mexico–Central American area as a unit to avoid the atomization of the counts for each lexical–semantic class of adjectives. For the same reason, we have decided not to differentiate between insular Caribbean and Antillean Caribbean areas. The other areas (Andean, Chilean and Rioplatense or Austral areas) have been considered independently, following the aforementioned references, which define them as distinct areas.

The interviews used as a corpus for elaborating the database have a total of 3,278,060 words. The number of words of each subcorpus, the acronyms of each city (which are also used in the references of the examples in this paper), and the time range in which the texts were compiled are as follows:

• Mexican and Central American area: Mexico (Mexicali MXLI, Ciudad de Mexico MEXI, Guadalajara GUAD, Monterrey MONR, Puebla PUEB); Guatemala (Ciudad de Guatemala GUAT): 108 interviews, 1,280,631 words (1,158,153 words in Mexico and 122,478 in the Central American area). Data collected between 11-2001 and 03-2018.
• Caribbean area (Continental and Antillean): Colombia (Barranquilla BARR), Venezuela (Caracas CARA), Cuba (La Habana LHAB): 54 interviews, 479,038 words (07-2001–12-2011)
• Andean area: Bolivia (La Paz LPAZ), Colombia (Bogota BOGO, Cali CALI, Medellin MEDE, Pereira PERE), Peru (Lima LIMA), Venezuela (Mérida MEVE): 126 interviews, 969,863 words. (08-2004–10-2022)
• Chilean area: Chile (Santiago de Chile SCHI): 18 interviews, 208,938 words. (05-2007–04-2009)
• Rioplatense area: Argentina (Buenos Aires BAIR), Uruguay (Montevideo MONV): 36 interviews, 339,590 words. (11-2007–06-2012)

As will be shown more specifically below, the differences found in the extent of the innovative estar-structure between areas indicate genuine dialectal differences, which do not derive from an imbalance in the corpus used to compile the database.

The search interface of Preseea allows for including lemmas and categorial tags. The following search strings were used to extract documented examples of the innovative estar-structure with adjectival predicates. The searches were carried out between March and July 2023:

• (1)   Search 1: any form of the verb estar + an adjective
• ([(lemma=‘estar’ & pos=‘V.+’%c)] [(pos=‘AQ.+’%c)])
• (2)   Search 2: any form of the verb estar + an adverb + an adjective
• ([(lemma=‘estar’ & pos=‘V.+’%c)] [(pos=‘R.+’%c)] [(pos=‘AQ.+’%c)]).
• (3)   Search 3: sequences Qué + adjective + any form of the verb estar
• [(word=‘qué’%c)] [(pos=‘AQ.+’%c)] [(lemma=‘estar’%c)]

These searches yielded 2881 naturalistic examples of estar-sentences, with a total of 337 adjectives. In this paper, only those adjectives that appear in at least one example illustrating the innovative estar-structure were considered for inclusion in the database in order to provide quantitative-based generalizations. Thus, perfective adjectives and adjectival participles were excluded from our database, as they were found only in examples illustrating the general/standard use of copular estar-sentences. Other qualifying adjectives documented only in general/standard sentences were not considered from the quantitative perspective, but were used to build up descriptive generalizations, as will be shown below. Furthermore, given the relevance to the analysis here of the lexical–syntactic class to which an adjective belongs, the methodological decision was taken to not include in the database those lexical items whose syntactic–semantic properties are not well established in the literature and do not fit into the lexical–syntactic classes mentioned in Section 2.4 The remaining examples were classified as “general/standard” or “innovative”, according to the definitions provided in the previous section. In cases where the context did not allow the researchers to clearly determine the innovative or standard interpretation of the estar-sentence (recall Note 2), it was considered uninterpretable and was excluded from subsequent counts.

Once these methodological decisions were undertaken, the database used to establish the quantitative-based generalizations that will be presented in the following subsections includes 88 adjectives that appear in at least 1 example of innovative estar-structure, with a total of 847 examples: 215 examples illustrating the general/standard use of estar and 632 innovative examples. In cases where a single form has two different syntactic–semantic uses, consecutive numeration has been used to differentiate each of them: e.g., chiquito1 is an age adjective, and chiquito2 is a dimensional size adjective.

The examples in the database were annotated with the following information retrieved from the corpus: interview reference, city, country, gender, age and educational level of the interviewee.5 The countries were linked to the dialectal areas indicated above. Moreover, adjectival predicates were classified according to the lexical–semantic–syntactic classes established in Demonte (1999a, 1999b, 2011, apud Dixon 1982), which were introduced in Section 2:

• Qualifying adjectives:

  (f)

  Dimensional adjectives.

  (g)

  Age adjectives.

  (h)

  Property adjectives.

  (i)

  Color adjectives.

  (j)

  Evaluative adjectives.

  • Extreme-degree adjectives.
  • Aesthetic adjectives.
  • Predicates of personal taste.
  • Predicates of personal judgment.
  • Other evaluatives.

• Non-qualifying adjectives: relational, circumstance or adverbial and modal adjectives.

In the following section, the findings on the extent of the innovative estar-construction in American Spanish are presented, considering the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectival predicates that appear in it and their geographical extension.

4. Results of the Corpus Study: Lexical–Syntactic Classes of Adjectives in Innovative Estar-Sentences

Table 1. Total number of general and innovative examples in the database by adjectival class.

Adjectival Class	Age	Evaluative	Dimensional	Property	Non-Qualifying	Total
General use	6 (1.4%)	95 (44.4%)	12 (20%)	102 (70.8%)	0	215 (25.4%)
Innovative use	413 (98.6%)	119 (55.6%)	48 (80%)	42 (29.2%)	10 (100%)	632 (74.6%)
Total	419 (100%)	214 (100%)	60 (100%)	144 (100%)	10 (100%)	847 (100%)

Column-% is indicated between ().

below shows the total number of estar-sentences found for each lexical–syntactic class of adjectives. As mentioned above, the database contains 847 examples—215 examples illustrating the general/standard use of estar and 632 innovative examples—with a total of 88 adjectives. Recall that only adjectives appearing in at least one example of innovative estar-structure were included in the database.

Table 2. Geolectal distribution of the innovative estar-sentences by lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives.

Adjectival Class	Age	Evaluative	Dimensional	Property	Non-Qualifying	Total
American Sp. Variety
Mex. and Central Am.	200 (48.4%)	86 (72.3%)	44 (91.8%)	30 (71.3%)	7 (70%)	367 (58%)
Caribbean	68 (16.5%)	8 (6.7%)	2 (4.1%)	3 (7.2%)	2 (20%)	83 (13.2%)
Andean	131 (31.7%)	18 (15.1%)	2 (4.1)	9 (21.5)	1 (10%)	161 (25.6%)
Chilean	10 (2.4%)	3 (2.5%)	0	0	0	13 (2%)
Rioplatense	4 (1%)	4 (3.4%)	0	0	0	8 (1.2%)
Total	413 (100%)	119 (100%)	48 (100%)	42 (100%)	10 (100%)	632 (100%)

Column-% is indicated between ().

below shows the geolectal distribution of the 632 innovative estar-sentences documented in the database, considering the lexical–syntactic class to which the adjectival predicates belong. The adjectival classes are presented in decreasing order from left to right according to their occurrence in a greater or lesser number of dialectal areas: age adjectives > evaluative adjectives (considering this class as a whole) > dimensional adjectives > property adjectives > and non-qualifying adjectives (adverbial, relational, and modal adjectives) used as predicates. The dialectal areas have been ordered taking into account the north–south geographical axis.

In the following subsections, each of the adjectival classes will be discussed in more detail. The ordering of the dialectal areas will be the same in all the tables shown.

4.1. Age Adjectives

• Number of age adjectives in the database found in at least one innovative example and total number of examples for this class: 13 age adjectives (expressing the chronological age of an animate entity) occurring in at least one innovative estar-sentence were included in the database, with a total of 419 examples.
• Number of general/innovative examples: As can be seen in

  Table 3. Age adjectives in estar-sentences.

  Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
  General use	2 (1%) row% 33.4	0	1 (0.8%) row% 16.6	0	3 (42.9%) row% 50	6 (1.4%) row% 100
  Innovative use	200 (99%) row% 48.4	68 (100%) row% 16.5	131 (99.2%) row% 31.7	10 (100%) row% 2.4	4 (57.1%) row% 1	413 (98.6%) row% 100
  Total	202 (100%) row% 48.2	68 (100%) row% 16.2	132 (100%) row% 31.5	10 (100%) row% 2.4	7 (100%) row% 1.7	419 (100%)

  Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

  above, 98.6% of the total of 419 examples illustrate the innovative use of the copular structure.

• Lexical items: The adjectives documented in innovative estar-sentences are the following: adolescente “adolescent”, adulto “adult”, chavo “little”, chico1 “little”, chiquitito “very little”, chiquito1 “very little”, grande1 “old”, joven “young”, mayor “old”, niño “little”, pequeño1 “little”, sardino “adolescent”, viejo1 “old”. Only grande1, mayor, viejo1 “old” also appeared in examples illustrating the standard structure with estar.
  Some adjectives appear only once and restricted to a single dialectal area: adolescente “adolescent” (Chile), adulto “adult”, sardino “adolescent” (Colombia), chavo “little” (Mexico). On the contrary, the forms chico1 “little”, chiquito1 and chiquitito1 “very little”, are documented in innovative examples in all varieties except in those from the Rioplatense area. Grande1 and viejo1 are documented in innovative examples in all dialectal areas.
• Dialectal distribution: The presence of this class of adjectives in the innovative structure is documented in all the dialectal areas, with similar percentages, except for the Rioplatense area.6 Thus, the appearance of this class of adjectives in combination with estar to express chronological age can be considered a robust innovative characteristic of American Spanish, as has been claimed in the literature. If the row% is considered, it is Mexican and Central American (48%), Andean (31%), and Caribbean (16%) areas that are leading in innovation with age adjectives.
• Other adjectives of this class found in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-sentences: It is also important to note that no age adjective has been documented exclusively in estar-sentences illustrating the standard/general use.
• Examples: Some innovative examples with adjectives of this kind are offered in (7)–(9) below. In these examples, the estar-sentence solely expresses chronological age.

(7)	I: y ya	tiene	una	niña (…)	una beba	de	tres	meses
	and already	has	a	baby	a baby-girl	of	three	months
	E: está	bien	chiquita
	is.ESTAR.3.sg	really	small
	I: and she already has a baby girl (…) a three-month-old baby girl. E: she (the baby) is very little/young. (México, MONR_M21_044)

(8)	[Context: Talking about the changes that Medellín has undergone]
	(…) pues		o sea	los	años	cuando	yo
	(…) mmm		well	the	years	when	I
	estaba	joven//	por ahí	de	quince	de dieciocho	años
	was.ESTAR	young	around	of	fifteen	of eighteen	years
	nunca	pensé	ver	esta	ciudad	como está	ahora
	never	thought.1.sg	see	this	city	as is	now
	Well, when I was young, around fifteen or eighteen years old, I never thought I would see this city as it is today. (Colombia, MEDE_H21_002)

(9)	[Context: Telling anecdotes of life]
	(…)	esa	noche	del	terremoto (…)	/estaba	un	mi
	(…)	that	night	of.the	earthquake	was.ESTAR.3.sg	a	my
	hermano/	(…) con	mis	hijos,	ellos	estaban	pequeños,	mi
	brother	with	my	children	they	were.ESTAR.3.pl	little	my
	esposa	y	yo	30
	wife	and	I	30
	…that night of the earthquake (…)/my brother was there/(…)/with my children, they were young, and my wife and I were 30 years old. (Guatemala, GUAT_H31_031)

The standard use is illustrated in the following example, where the adjective expresses (possibly ironic) the inadequacy of age for a certain activity: E.: ¿y sos de ir a bailar?—I.: ahora muy poco/antes sí (…) ahora como que ya con veintitrés años ya estoy viejo ya para eso <risas> “E.: And do you go dancing?—I.: now very little/before I did (…) now I’m twenty-three years old and I’m_.ESTAR too old for that <laughs>“ (Uruguay, MONV_H11_035).

4.2. Evaluative Adjectives

The macro-class of evaluative adjectives consists of semantic and syntactically complex subclasses of adjectives with unequal behavior in the innovative structure with estar. Taken as a whole, as shown in

Table 4. Evaluative adjectives in estar-sentences.

Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
General use	52 (37.7%) row% 54.7	9 (53%) row% 9.5	26 (59%) row% 27.4	4 (57%) row% 4.2	4 (50%) row% 4.2	95 (44.4%) row% 100
Innovative use	86 (62.3%) row% 72.3	8 (47%) row% 6.7	18 (41%) row% 15.1	3 (43%) row% 2.5	4 (50%) row% 3.4	119 (55.6%) row% 100
Total	138 (100%) row% 64.5	17 (100%) row% 8	44 (100%) row% 20.5	7 (100%) row% 3.3	8 (100%) row% 3.7	214 (100%)

Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

, this macro-class appears in innovative estar-sentences in all dialectal areas: 95 examples out of 214 illustrate the general use (4.4%) and 119 examples illustrate the innovative use (55.6%). In the area of Mexico and Central America, the number of innovative estar-sentences in which this class of adjectives appears exceeds the number of sentences illustrating the standard/general use. If the row% of innovative use is considered, it is the Mexican and Central American area that is leading in innovation with this adjectival class.

In the following subsections, extreme-degree adjectives (Section 4.2.1), adjectives of personal judgment (Section 4.2.2), aesthetic adjectives (Section 4.2.3) and the heterogeneous class of “other” evaluative adjectives are analyzed separately. It should be noted that predicates of personal taste were found in the corpus only in standard estar-sentences. Specifically, 21 examples were found of standard estar-sentences with the adjectives bárbaro1 “awesome”, bueno1 “good”, exquisito “exquisite”, rico2 “tasty” used as personal taste predicates (see the example (16) below). Recall that it has been generally claimed in the literature that predicates of personal taste have an experiencer/judge argument in their argument structure that can provide counterparts to form the within-the-individual comparison class required in estar-sentences in standard Spanish, giving rise to an experiential reading (see example (2) above) (Moreno-Quibén 2022; Gumiel-Molina et al. 2023).

4.2.1. Extreme-Degree Adjectives

• Number of extreme-degree adjectives in the database found in at least one innovative example and total number of examples for this class: five extreme-degree adjectives occurring in at least one innovative estar-sentences were included in the database, with a total of nine examples.
• Number of general/innovative examples: As can be seen in

  Table 5. Extreme-degree adjectives in estar-sentences.

  Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
  General use	1 (14.3%) row% 100	0	0	0	0	1 (11.1%) row% 100
  Innovative use	6 (85.7%) row% 75	0	2 (100%) row% 25	0	0	8 (88.9%) row% 100
  Total	7 (100%) row% 77.8	0	2 (100%) row% 22.2	0	0	9 (100%)

  Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

  , eight examples (88.9%) of the total of nine examples illustrate the innovative use of the copular structure.

• Lexical items: The adjectives documented in innovative estar-sentences are the following: especial “special”, impresionante “impressive”, mortal “terrific”, terrible “horrible”, tremendo “tremendous” (with also one occurrence in the general structure).
• Dialectal distribution: The innovative use of this class of adjectives in estar-sentences is documented in the Mexican and Central American and Andean areas.7
• Other adjectives of this class found in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-sentences: It is also important to note that 18 adjectives belonging to this class have been documented in the corpus exclusively in estar-sentences illustrating the standard/general use (occurrence-range from 1 to 22, in a total of 107 examples): bárbaro2 “awesome”, bravo1 “great”, bonito2 “beautiful”, chévere “cool”, chido “cool”, divino “divine”, espantoso “awful”, espectacular “amazing”, fabuloso “fabulous”, feo2 “ugly”, genial “great”, grande3 “great”, horrible “horrible”, ideal “ideal”, lindo2 “nice”, padre “great”, perfecto “perfect”, pésimo “terrible” y rico3 “nice” (some are restricted to specific areas such as padre, chido Mx.).

As was claimed before, extreme-degree adjectives expressing highest positive or negative degree, such as those in (4a) and (4b) (espectacular “amazing”, bárbaro “awesome” and genial “great”), have an experiencer/judge in their argument structure in standard Spanish. When they appear as predicates in copular estar-sentences, this argument provides counterparts to form a within-an-individual comparison class, giving rise to the general/standard judge-oriented estar-sentences. It should be remembered that in these sentences, the subject expresses a situation (when it refers to structured events or to propositional content) or takes part in a situation in which the experiencer/judge also participates.

• Examples: Innovative examples typically have subjects that are not possible in general Spanish in estar-sentences with this kind of adjective. In (10), the subject expresses an unstructured event (collision) in which the experiencer/judge does not play any role (contrary to what happened in (4) above); (11) below refers to magnitudes or abstract entities.

(10)	[Context: Talking about the work and importance of paramedics]
	ellos	también	ven	muchas	cosas	(…) por	ejemplo
	they	also	see.3.PL	many	things	for	example
	unos	choques	que	están	impresionantes
	some	collisions	that	are.3.PL.ESTAR	impressive
		They also see many things (…) for example, some collisions that are very impressive. (México, PUEB_M23_069)

(11)	a. [Context: Someone is narrating coming from a distant city]
	(…) la	distancia	de	norte	a	sur	está	tremenda
	the	distance	from	north	to	south	is.ESTAR	tremendous
	The distance from north to south is tremendous. (México, MEXI_H21_090)
	b. (…)	ni	de	ir	a	ningún	lugar	porque
		or	of	going	to	any	place	because
		el	frío	está	terrible
		the	cold	is.ESTAR	terrible
	You cannot go anywhere because the cold is terrible (Bolivia, LPAZ_M32_016)

4.2.2. Adjectives of Personal Judgment

• Number of adjectives of personal judgment in the database found in at least one innovative example and total number of examples for this class: nine adjectives of personal judgment occurring in at least one innovative estar-sentence were included in the data base, with a total of 102 examples.
• Number of general/innovative examples: As shown in

  Table 6. Adjectives of personal judgment in estar-sentences.

  Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
  General use	35 (53.8%) row% 57.4	5 (83.3%) row% 8.2	17 (63%) row% 27.8	1 (100%) row% 1.6	3 (100%) row% 5	61 (59.8%) row% 100
  Innovative use	30 (46.2%) row% 73.2	1 (16.7%) row% 2.4	10 (37%) row% 24.4	0	0	41 (40.2%) row 100
  Total	65 (100%) row% 63.7	6 (100%) row% 5.9	27 (100%) row% 26.5	1 (100%) row% 1	3 (100%) row% 2.9	102 (100%)

  Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

  , there are 41 innovative examples (40.2%) vs. 62 examples (59.8%) illustrating the standard/general use of the copular structure.

• Lexical items: The adjectives documented in innovative estar-sentences are the following: bizarro “bizarre”, difícil “difficult”, fuerte2 “strong”, grueso2 (meaning “difícil”) “difficult”, leve “slight”, pesado “heavy”, raro “weird”, suave2 “pleasant”, trabajoso “laborious” (range of innovative examples of each item from 1 to 18).
• Dialectal distribution: Standard examples are documented in all dialectal areas; innovative examples are restricted to the Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean areas.
• Other adjectives of this class found in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-sentences: It is also important to note that 10 adjectives belonging to this class have been documented in the corpus exclusively in estar-sentences illustrating the standard/general use, with a total of 14 examples (range of occurrences of each adjective 1–3): aceptable “acceptable”, agradable “pleasant”, cómico (meaning “divertido”) “funny”, complicado “complicated”, crítico (meaning “difícil”) “difficult”, divertido “fun, amusing”, duro2 “hard”, extraño “strange”, fácil “easy”, fastidioso “annoying”. Examples:

As was also explained before, predicates of personal judgment also have an experiencer/judge argument (fácil/difícil/divertido for X). Thus, when they appear as predicates in copular estar-sentences in standard Spanish, this argument can provide counterparts to form a within-the-individual comparison class. This is the case in sentences like La crianza de los hijos está muy difícil “Parenting is_.ESTAR very difficult” (Colombia, BOGO_M22_057), whose subject expresses a situation in which the experiencer/judge participates. Recall also (3).

• Examples: The following examples below are illustrative of the innovative construction. In (12), a lexical item (fuerte “strong”) that does not combine with estar in standard Spanish is presented (note that the same lexical item is combined with ser in the same context in the previous discourse. In (13) and (14), subjects that are not possible in standard sentences with these predicates are illustrated, that is to say, events in which the experiencer/judge does not participate or other kinds of abstract nouns.

(12)

[Context: talking about religious life]

Previous paragraph:

I: [La muerte] (…)/no posee nada//no tiene nada…

E: pero que a la vez eso también es muy fuerte/¿no? o sea no poseer nada…

(…)

I: (…) yo tengo por ahí un amigo/muy querido que renunció a todo (…) es un misionero/franciscano

E: y su amigo por ejemplo/¿a qué edad decidió?

I: muy joven/a los veinticinco años

 

“I: [Death] (…)/possesses nothing//has nothing…

E: but, at the same time, that is_.SER also very harsh/isn’t it? that is to say, not owning anything?

(…)

I: (…) I have a very dear friend who renounced everything (…) he is a Franciscan/Franciscan missionary.

E: and your friend for example/at what age did he decide?

I: very young/at the age of twenty-five.”

	es que	está	muy	fuerte	eso/	tienes	que	estar
	well	is.3.SG.ESTAR	very	strong	that	have.2.SG	to	be
	muy	convencido
	very	convinced
		That’s very strong, you have to be very convinced. (México, MONR_M22_060)

(13)

Previous paragraph:

I: …incrédulos de lo que estaba pasando porque pues/nosotros lo habíamos visto ayer y ahora ya no está/así como que te quedas/(…)/

“we were incredulous at what was going on because/we had seen him yesterday and now he’s gone/so you’re just like…”

	te	digo	que	estuvo	muy	rara	su	muerte
	you.DAT	tell	that	was.3.SG.ESTAR	very	weird	his	death
		I tell you that his death was very weird. (México, MONR_M22_060)

(14)	a.	[Context: Talking about the psychology studies that the speaker completed in her youth]
		¿Está	muy	difícil	la	carrera?
		is.3.SG.ESTAR	very	difficult	the	degree
		Is the degree very difficult? (México, MXLI_M23_032)

4.2.3. Aesthetic Adjectives

The class of aesthetic adjectives (bello “beautiful”, guapo “handsome”, lindo “cute, beautiful”…) expresses the aesthetic value of an entity. These adjectives give rise to a within-the-individual comparison based on the subject of predication when combined with estar in standard/general Spanish, as it was shown previously in Section 2. The distribution of the data for this class of adjectives is shown in the table below.

• Number of aesthetic adjectives in the database found in at least one innovative example and total number of examples for this class: seven aesthetic adjectives with at least one innovative occurrence were found in the database, with a total of 74 examples.
• Number of general/innovative examples: As shown in

  Table 7. Aesthetic adjectives.

  Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
  General use	16 (34.8%) row% 48.5	4 (44.4%) row% 12.2	9 (75%) row% 27.2	3 (100%) row% 9.1	1 (25%) row% 3	33 (44.6%) row% 100
  Innovative use	30 (65.2%) row% 73.2	5 (55.6%) row% 12.2	3 (25%) row% 7.3	0	3 (75%) row% 7.3	41 (55.4%) row% 100
  Total	46 (100%) row% 62.2	9 (100%) row% 12.2	12 (100%) row% 16.2	3 (100%) row% 4	4 (100%) row% 5.4	74 (100%)

  Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

  , 41 examples (55.4%) of the total of 74 examples illustrate the innovative use of the copular structure. 33 examples (44.6%) illustrate the standard/general use.

• Lexical items: The adjectives documented in innovative estar-sentences are the following: bello, bonito1 “beautiful”, feo1 “ugly”, guapo “handsome”, hermoso, lindo1 “beautiful”, precioso “precious” (the number of examples obtained for each ranges from 1 to 25—bonito1 “beautiful”––). The adjectives bello, bonito1 “beautiful”, feo1 “ugly”, precioso “precious” and lindo “cute, beautiful” were also documented in examples illustrating the general use of estar-sentences.
• Dialectal distribution: As can be seen in Table 7, the number of innovative examples exceeds the number of standard estar-sentences, but this pattern is marked only in the Mexican and Central American area and the Caribbean area. These results are consistent with the conclusions reached by Moreno-Quibén (2022) and Gumiel-Molina et al. (2023), where the innovative use of estar-sentences with aesthetic adjectives is explored in detail.
• Other adjectives of this class found in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-sentences: It is important to note that no adjectives of this kind appeared only in standard context in the corpus.
• Examples:

Some examples illustrating the innovative use of estar-sentences with aesthetic adjectives are offered in (15)–(17) below. These examples do not compare counterparts of the subject, as is clearly seen in (15)–(16), where the speaker relates his first experience with an unknown referent and therefore no comparison can be made with previous counterparts or with possible alternative counterparts based on an expectation. In (17) the innovative structure appears within an intensional context. It is important to note that, according to both Moreno-Quibén (2022) and Gumiel-Molina et al. (2023), aesthetic adjectives lack an experiencer/judge argument in the standard variety of Spanish (even though expressing an evaluative property, see McNally and Stojanovic 2015); the presence of this argument is, in their proposal, the locus of the syntactic variation giving rise to the innovative examples in some American varieties, as will be seen below.

(15)

Previous paragraph:

• … ahora/te voy a contar/si me lo permites//cómo//conoció (…) a mi madre//mi padre//con veintipico de años//ya tenía/carro propio (…) y pasa/por delante//de uno de los palacios/más/ostentosos de//del Vedado//(…) y da la casualidad/que mi mamá//que era/ayuda de cámara//de la señora/de esa casa//de esa mansión//y mi madre/en ese momento/se encontraba/en el jardín//(…) mi padre/se quedó mirando//detuvo el carro//y lo primero que dijo/“esa gallega/tiene que ser para mí, porque ¡qué hermosa!
• “… now/I’m going to tell you/if you allow me//how//he met (…) my mother//my father//in his early twenties//already had/his own car (…) and passed/in front//of//one of the most/splendid/palaces//in Vedado//(…).) and it so happens/that my mother//who was/a chambermaid//of the lady/of that house//of that mansion//and my mother/at that moment/was/in the garden//(…) my father/stared//stopped the car//and the first thing he said/”that gallega/has to be for me because!

	“¡qué	bella	está!”	¡bueno!	entonces	él	se apea	del carro
	how	beautiful	is.3.SG.ESTAR	well	then	he	got out	of.the car
		“How beautiful she is!”//well!//then he got out of the car. (LHAB_H33_097, La Habana, Cuba)

(16)	y	me	vendió	la	torta	y	la	torta
	and	me.DATIVE	sold.3SG	the	cake	and	the	cake
	estaba	sabrosa/	y	estaba	bonita
	was.3.SG.ESTAR	tasty	and	was.3.SG.ESTAR	pretty
	And she sold me the cake and the cake was tasty and it was pretty. (Venezuela, CARA_M11_007)

(17)

Previous paragraph:

• yo mi mundo lo hacía muy cerradito (…)/o sea nunca andaba con alguien que no bailara o que no fuera músico/
•  
• “my world was very closed (…)/I never went with someone who didn’t dance or wasn’t a musician”

o	que	no	estuviera	muy	guapo	o sea	o	que
or	who	not	was.3.SG.SUBJUNCTIVE.ESTAR	very	handsome	that is	or	who
no	fuera	como	de	la	moda
not	was.3.SG.SER	like	of	the	fashion
	[someone] who wasn’t very handsome or wasn’t fashionable. (Mexico, MEXI_M12_048)

4.2.4. Other Evaluative Adjectives

Finally, there is a group of lexical items with evaluative meaning that are difficult to classify in the aforementioned classes, which have been considered together. Their distribution is shown in

Table 8. Other evaluative adjectives.

Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
General use	0 (%) row%	0 (%) row%	0 (%) row%	0 (%) row%	0 (%) row%	0 (%) row% 100
Innovative use	20 (%) row% 69	2 (%) row% 6.7	3 (%) row% 10.4	3 (%) row% 10.4	1 (%) row% 3.5	29 (100%) row% 100
Total	20 (100%) row% 69	2 (100%) row% 6.7	3 (100%) row% 10.4	3 (100%) row% 10.4	1 (100%) row% 3.5	29 (100%)

Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

:

• Number of other evaluative adjectives found in the database exclusively in innovative examples and total number of examples for this class: 8 adjectives of this class were included in the database, with a total of 29 examples.
• Number of general/innovative examples: All the examples illustrate the innovative use of copular estar-sentences.
• Lexical items: The adjectives documented in innovative estar-sentences are the following: (occurrence range 1–15 –peligroso “dangerous”–): conflictivo “conflictive”, correcto “correct”, importante “important”, inseguro “insecure”, peligroso “dangerous”, recto “upright” (moral predicates, Stojanovic and McNally 2022), seguro3 “secure”, significativo “significant”.
• Dialectal distribution: These evaluative adjectives are documented in all dialect areas, although their number is higher in the Mexican and Central American area. Examples: Some innovative examples are shown below. The adjectives in (18), (19), and (20) are ungrammatical in standard Spanish with the copula estar. In these examples, the subjects refer to abstract entities, situations or propositional contents. When the subject refers to places, (21), no counterparts of the entity referred to are compared.

(18)

Previous paragraph:

E: ¿y vio bastantes cambios en su casa o sigue estando así/desde siempre?

I: la casa ha tenido cambios/(…) pero últimamente está muy estático (…) hacemos pequeños cambios

“E: and did you see many changes in your house or has it always been like this?

I: the house has had changes/(...) but lately it is very static (…) we make small changes”

pero	que	no	están	muy	significativos
but	that	not	are.3.PL.ESTAR	very	significant
		but they are not very significant. (Bolivia, LPAZ_M23_012)

(19)

Previous paragraph:

• [alguien recibe una llamada de teléfono]… “chamo vente para tu casa ¿no viste el mensaje?/te mandé un mensaje ahorita/que hay un primo tuyo herido”, y yo “¿herido güevón?”/no le paré mucho/me vuelvo a meter en clase/leo el mensaje ¡verga! (…) y entonces/yo bueno vamos a esperar un ratico a ver/
• “[someone receives a phone call]… “boy, come home, didn’t you see the message?/I sent you a message right now/that your cousin is hurt”, and I “hurt, asshole?”/I didn’t pay much attention/I go back to class/I read the message (…) and then/well, let’s wait a little while to see/”

la	clase	estaba	muy	importante	ta ta ta	y	yo	estaba
the	class	was.3.SG.ESTAR	very	important	uh	and	I	was
preocupado	ya,	¿no?
worried	already	wasn’t I
	the class was very important, uh, and I was already worried, wasn’t I? (Venezuela, CARA_H13_073)

• (20)  [Context: talking about punishments in cases of corruption or criminal acts in the armed forces; the speaker refers to the military base of Sonoyta, Mexico, where in his opinion the law is applied fairly and equally regardless of military rank]
• Previous paragraph:

I: sí pero estamos hablando que/estamos hablando de que la gente de arriba/entre más estrellas y más barras tengan/menos les pasan cosas pues (…)

E: siempre es así //pero te voy a decir que

“I: yes but we are saying that/we are saying that the people at the top/the more stars and bars they have/the less things happen to them so (…).

E: it’s always like that//but I’m going to tell you that

ahí	la	de	Sonoyta	estaba	muy	recto	todo
there	the	of	Sonoyta	was.3.SG.ESTAR	very	upright	everything
	there in Sonoyta everything was very upright. (México, MXLI_H12_011)

(21)

Previous paragraph:

E: sí/lo/pues nosotros siempre/en mi familia siempre vamos a la playa en semana santa/nada más que/lo único malo es como que el tráfico/que hay muchísima gente en esa en esa semana

I: sí

E: sí, y hay muchos accidentes

I: y luego para allá, para Autlán/eres de Autlán ¿verdad?

E: sí

 

“E: yes/well/well we always/in my family we always go to the beach during Easter week/the only bad thing is the traffic/there are a lot of people during that week

I: yes

I: yes and there are a lot of accidents

I: and then to Autlan/you are from Autlan, right?

E: yes”

I:	para	allá	las	curvas	están	medias	peligrosas
	over	there	the	bends	are.3.SG.ESTAR	half	dangerous
	Over there the bends are quite dangerous (continuation: Sí sí, he manejado para allá y está complicadón “Yes, yes, I have driven there and it is very complicated”). (Mexico, GUAD_H23_004)

4.3. Dimensional Adjectives

Number of dimensional adjectives in the database found in at least one innovative example and total number of examples for this class: 15 dimensional adjectives occurring in at least 1 innovative example were included in the database, with a total of 60 examples. Their distribution is shown in

Table 9. Dimensional adjectives.

Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
General use	7 (13.7%) row% 58.3	3 (60%) row% 25	2 (50%) row% 16.7	0	0	12 (20%) row% 100
Innovative use	44 (86.3%) row% 91.6	2 (40%) row% 4.2	2 (50%) row% 4.2	0	0	48 (80%) row% 100
Total	51 (100%) row% 85	5 (100%) row% 8.3	4 (100%) row% 6.7	0	0	60 (100%)

Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

:

• Number of general/innovative examples: As can be seen in Table 9, 48 examples (80%) of the total of 60 examples with dimensional adjectives illustrate the innovative use of the copular structure. However, these examples are restricted mainly to the Mexican and Central American area.
• Lexical items: The adjectives documented in innovative estar-sentences are the following: (occurrence range 1–4): amplio “large”, ancho “wide”, bajo1 “short”, chaparrito “short”, chico2, chiquito2 “little”, enano “tiny”, enorme “huge”, espacioso “spacious”, extenso “large”, grande2 “big”, grueso1 “thick”, largo “long”, pequeño2 “small”, reducido “cramped”. Only the adjective grande2 “big” has been documented also in standard examples (12 standard examples and 22 innovative examples).
• Dialectal distribution: The innovative use of this class of adjectives in estar-sentences is documented in the Mexican and Central American area, and also in the Caribbean and Andean areas. If the row% of innovative use is considered, it is the Mexican and Central American area that is leading in innovation with this adjectival class.
• Other adjectives of this class found in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-sentences: six dimensional adjectives belonging to this class have been documented in the corpus exclusively in estar-sentences illustrating the standard/general use (occurrence-range from 1 to 18 –gordo–, in a total of 29 examples, distributed in all dialectal areas): alto1 “tall”, corto “short” (in examples such as Estamos cortos de dinero “We are short of money”), and adjectives expressing weight: delgado “thin”, gordo “fat”, flaco “thin”.
• Examples: Some innovative examples are offered in (22)–(26) below; see also (5) above. None of them express a comparison between counterparts of the subject of predication with respect to the dimensional property expressed by the adjective. The innovative use is more frequent when the subject does not refer to human or animate entities but to places, inanimate objects, or abstract concepts.

(22)

Previous paragraph:

I: pues ahora luego nos buscamos un lugar más grandecito porque sí

“I: well, now we are looking for a bigger place because”

están	muy	reducidas	las	recámaras/	apenas	una	camita
are.3.PL.ESTAR	very	small	the	bedrooms	just	a	bed
y	un	buró.
And	a	desk
E:	Ah	o sea sí	está	chiquito.
E:	Oh	yes	is.3.SG.ESTAR	small
	The bedrooms are very small, just a bed and a bureau/E: Oh yes, it is very small. (Mexico, MEXI_M21_096)

(23)	E: (…)	¿cómo	es	tu	casa?
		How	is.3.SG.SER	your	house
	I: (…)	era	con	cochera/(…)	sala/(…)	estaba	muy
		was.3.SG.SER	with	garage	living room	was.3.SG.ESTAR	very
	pequeña	la	casa	pero	estaba	muy	chida
	small	the	house	but	was.3.SG.ESTAR	very	nice
	E: What was your house like?/I: (…) it had a garage/living room/the house was very small but it was very nice. (Mexico, GUAD_H13_014)

• (24) [Context: Talking about the interviewee’s participation in the dance of the Curpites in the role of a Curpite and about the costume he wore in that dance]
• Previous paragraph:

I: y la máscara pues de plano no te deja ver ni mais

E: sí/sí

I: y luego las mangas/o sea/sí me gustó

E: ¡y pesan!/¿no?

I: sí/pesan

E: sí pesa un buen/y la máscara es de madera/¿verdad?

I: sí

 

“I: and the mask doesn’t let you see anything else.

E: yes/yes

I: and then the sleeves/I mean/yes, I liked it.

E: and they are heavy, aren’t they?

I: yes/they are heavy

E: they do weigh a lot/and the mask is made of wood/isn’t it?

I: yes”

E:	pero	sí	está	gruesa	¿no?
	but	yes	is.3.SG.ESTAR	thick	isn’t it
		But it really is thick, isn’t it? (Mexico, MEXI_H12_042)

• (25) [Context: Talking about the causes that make it take a long time to travel the distance between two nearby cities]
• Previous paragraph:

E: ¿porque están los precipicios?

I: sí/porque están los precipicios muy feos

E: y vienen los traileres bien rápido y puedes chocar de frente

I: sí entonces tienes que ir despacio/

 

“E: because of the cliffs?

I: yes/because the cliffs are very ugly (“bad”)

E: and the trailers come very fast and you can crash head-on.

I: yes then you have to go slowly/”

eso	es	lo que	lo	hace	largo,
that	is.3.SG.SER	what	it.ACCUSATIVE	makes	long
pero	no	está	largo.
but	not	is.3.SG.ESTAR	long
	That’s what makes it long/but it’s not long. (Mexico, MONR_M13_033)

(26)

Previous paragraph:

I: porque mira/si tú vas y compras/un largo de tu pantalón/te cuesta cincuenta pesos/hay telas hasta de cuarenta pesos/y con un largo te haces un pantalón/con un largo de altura/a tu gusto/a tu medida/como tú lo quieras

“I: because, look/if you go and buy (…)/there are fabrics that cost up to forty pesos/and with a piece of fabric you can make a pair of pants/(…) according to your taste/to your size/the way you want them”

E: eso	sí,	porque	ahorita,	¿no?,	están	muy	chiquitas
E: yes,		because	now	right?	are.3.PL.ESTAR	very	small
las	tallas	y	uno	batalla,	¿no?
the	sizes	and	one	struggles,	right?
	E: yes, because right now/right?/the sizes are too small and you struggle/right? (México, MONR_M31_082)

4.4. Property Adjectives

• Number of property adjectives in the database found in at least one innovative example and total number of examples for this class: 24 adjectives expressing non-dimensional properties were found in at least one innovative example and included in the database, with a total of 144 examples.
• Number of general/innovative examples: As can be seen in

  Table 10. Property adjectives.

  Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
  General use	51 (63%) row% 50	9 (75%) row% 8.8	23 (72%) row% 22.5	2 (100%) row% 2	17 (100%) row% 16.7	102 (70.8%) row% 100
  Innovative use	30 (37%) row% 71.4	3 (25%) row% 7.2	9 (28%) row% 21.4	0	0	42 (29.2%) row% 100
  Total	81 (100%) row% 56.2	12 (100%) row% 8.3	32 (100%) row% 22.3	2 (100%) row% 1.4	17 (100%) row% 11.8	144 (100%)

  Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

  , 102 examples (70.8%) of the total of 144 examples illustrate the general use of the copular structure, vs. 42 examples (29.2%) illustrate the innovative use.

• Lexical items: The following adjectives were documented exclusively in innovative sentences (occurrence range of each lexical item 1–6): accesible (meaning “cheap”), cariñoso (“expensive” in El Salvador and Mexico), chistoso “jokey”, cálido “warm”, costoso “expensive”, descarado “brazen”, despierto2 “alert”, entendible “comprehensible”, fuerte1 “hard”(“having strength or intensity”), invisible “invisible”, moderno (“modern, showing signs of modernity”), moroso “owing money”, pobre “poor”, puntual “punctual”, tenaz “tenacious”, raquítico “scarce, low in number”. On the other hand, the following adjectives appeared in both standard and innovative estar-sentences (the number of examples obtained for each of the adjectives ranged from one to seven in the innovative context and from one to 18 in the standard sentences): barato “cheap”, caliente “hot”, caro “expensive”, cómodo “comfortable”, cruel “unforgiving (applied to weather conditions)”, duro1 (“severe, intense”), frío “cold”, triste “sad”.
• Dialectal distribution: As shown in Table 8, the number of examples illustrating the general use exceeds the number of innovative sentences in all dialectal areas. The presence of this class of adjectives in the innovative structure is restricted to the Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean areas. If the row% of innovative use is considered, it is the Mexican and Central American area that is clearly leading in innovation with this adjectival class.
• Other adjectives of this class found in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-sentences: It is important to note that a further 82 property adjectives were documented in the corpus exclusively in sentences illustrating the general use, in all dialect areas, with a total of 369 examples (occurrence range from 1 to 114) (e.g., alegre “cheerful”, blando “soft”, débil “weak”, feliz “happy”, incómodo “uncomfortable”, nervioso “nervous”, plano “flat”, suave1 “smooth”, tranquilo “quiet” etc.).
• Examples: Some innovative examples are offered in (27)–(31) below, with different kinds of semantic entities as subjects. None of them express a comparison between counterparts of the subject of predication with respect to the property denoted by the adjective.

(27)

Previous paragraph:

I: ahí deportes cómo no/me gusta más verlo no hacerlo/es un/es es admirar a los atletas

“I: sports, of course/I like more to watch sports, not to practice/to admire the athletes”

E:	Sí, sí	está	más	cómodo
	yes, yes	is.3.SG.ESTAR	more	comfortable
I:	Me	canso	nomás	de	verlos
	myself	get.tired.1.SG	just	of	watch.them
	E: yes, yes, it’s more comfortable/I: I get tired just by watching them (Mexico, MONR_H13_025)

(28)

Previous paragraph:

• me regalaron unas blusas y no me atrevo a ponérmelas/le digo a mi hija “ay nomás de pensar en mis brazotes que se me vean” (…) “ya estoy viejita”/“ay pero no” dice
• “they gave me some blouses as a present and I don’t dare to wear them/I tell my daughter “oh, just to think of my arms showing” (…) “I’m already old”/”oh, but no” she says

“no	están	descaradas	tus	blusas	mama,	póntelas”
not	are.3.PL.ESTAR	brazen	your	blouses	mom	put-you.DAT-them.ACC
	“Your blouses are not brazen, mom, put them on” (Mexico, MEXI_M21_096)

(29)	[Context: Talking about a performance that the speaker has attended]
	y	el	guión	yo	siento	que	estuvo
	and	the	script	I	feel	that	was.3.SG.ESTAR
	muy	entendible,	pero	la	coreografía	ya	no
	very	comprehensible	but	the	choreography	then	not
		And the script, I feel that it was very comprehensible, but the choreography was not. (México, MEXI_H12_042)

• (30) [Context: Talking about a cotton processing plant]
• Previous paragraph:

I: (…) están esperando venderla pero piden mucho dinero/no se ponen de acuerdo/(…) o sea/todos/cualquiera de los algodoneros que está ahí se las compra pero/que les den precio//un buen precio

E: sí

“I: (…) they are waiting to sell it but they are asking for a lot of money/they do not agree/(…) that is/everyone/any of the cotton growers that are there would buy it but/they have to give them a good price//a good price.

E: yes”

I:	porque	está	buena	esta	planta
	because	is.3.SG.ESTAR	good	that	plant
E:	está	muy	grande	también
	is.3.SG.ESTAR	very	big	too
I:	está	moderna	pues	y	tiene	mucha	velocidad
	is.3.SG.ESTAR	modern	indeed	and	has	much	speed
	I: because that plant is good/E: it is also very big/I: it is modern and it is very fast. (Mexico, MXLI_H32_018)

• (31) [Context: The interviewer anticipates the questions he/she is going to ask the interviewee next]

las		siguientes	preguntas	están	bien	tristes	para	ti
the		following	questions	are.3.PL.ESTAR	very	sad	for	you.OBL
	“The following questions are very sad for you”. (Mexico, GUAD_H12_098)

4.5. Non-Qualifying (Adverbial, Relational and Modal) Adjectives Used as Predicates

Table 11. Property adjectives.

Dialectal Area	Mexican and Central American	Caribbean	Andean	Chilean	Rioplatense	Total
General use	0	0	0	0	0	0
Innovative use	7 (100%) row%	2 (100%) row%	1 (100%) row%	0	0	10 (%) row% 100
Total	7 (100%) row% 7	2 (100%) row% 2	1 (100%) row% 2	0	0	10 (100%)

Column-% is indicated between (); row-% is also indicated to show the relative areal distribution of the general/innovative examples and the areal distribution of the total of examples included in the database.

shows the results obtained for this class of non-qualifying adjectives in estar-sentences.

• Number of non-qualifying adjectives in the database found in innovative examples and total number of examples for this class: seven non-qualifying adjectives occurring in innovative estar-sentences were included in the database, with a total of 10 examples (four adverbial adjectives with a total of seven examples, two relational adjectives with a total of two examples, one modal adjective found in one example).
• Number of general/innovative examples: Estar-sentences with adverbial, relational and modal adjectives as predicates exemplify a radically innovative use since these classes of adjectives are only combined with ser when they appear in copular structures in general Spanish.
• Lexical items: Regarding adverbial adjectives, the following lexical items were documented in the innovative structure: antiguo “old, ancient, antique”, frecuente “frequent”, incipiente “incipient”, nuevo2 “new”. Two color items were found used as relational adjectives to express a person’s race: negro “black”, moreno “brown” (other color adjectives have been found only in standard examples in the corpus; blanco “white”, gris “grey”, verde “green”, and also claro “clear”, pálido “pale”, with a total of nine examples). Finally, one modal adjective was documented: imposible “impossible”.
• Dialectal distribution: The innovative use of this class of adjectives in estar-sentences is documented in the Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean areas.
• No other adjectives of this class were found in the corpus in estar-sentences.
• Examples: Adverbial adjectives are illustrated in (32) and (33) (note, in this example, that each of the participants in the conversation use different copulas with this lexical item). Relational adjectives and modal adjectives are illustrated in (34) and (35) respectively.

• (32) [Context: The interviewer asks if the interviewee has ever quit a job before and why]
• Previous paragraph:

I: en primer lugar//uno como vendedor rutero, no es un trabajo estable//que lo tenga uno//¿porque?//primero/por la situación que se está viviendo en Guatemala veá//

“I: first of all//one job as a route salesperson, it’s not a stable job//that you have//why?//first//because of the situation that Guatemala is going through//you see

Que	los	asaltos	están	muy	frecuentes
That	the	muggings	are.3.PL.ESTAR	very	frequent
		Muggings are very frequent. (Guatemala, GUAT_H12_044)

• (33) [Context: Speaking of a store in the neighborhood]
• Previous paragraphs:

I: creo que ya tiene cuarenta/o más de cuarenta años (…) ese negocio sí

E: no pues sí ya está

I: sí ya/está

E: ya es

I: es antiguo

 

“I: I think it is already forty/or more than forty years old (…) that store yes.

E: no well, it is_.ESTAR already

I: yes it already/is_.ESTAR

E: it is_.SER already

I: it is_.SER old”

E:	sí	ya	está	antiguo
	yes	already	is.3.SG.ESTAR	old
I:	sí
	Yes
	“E: Yes, it is already old. I: Yes, it is.” (Mexico, PUEB_M11_023)

• (34) Complete paragraph: I: (…) porque él sí fue mi papá/imagínate/rubio de ojos verdes/pues no parecía para nada mi papá/pero él, yo le/yo le gustaba mucho/¿no?/o sea aunque fue muy difícil porque/porque su familia/y más en ese tiempo <cita>es que está negrita, ¿por qué? dile a tu hija que deje a ese señor/todos le van a salir así<cita> que, o sea, sí era muy muy—E: racista el asunto. (México, MEXI_M12_048)

“I: (…) because he was my father/imagine/blond with green eyes/he didn’t look like my father at all/but he, he liked me/he liked me a lot/right?/I mean, although it was very difficult because/because his family/and even more at that time <cite>she is_.ESTAR black, why? tell your daughter to leave that man/all her children will turn out like that<cite> that, I mean, it was very racist/I: the whole thing was very racist.

(35)

Complete paragraph:

I: pero, pero bueno, yo insisto, lo menos importante es el toro ¿eh?, lo menos importante para los antitaurinos es que se maten o no los toros, creo que hay mucho/mucho aderezo y algunos otros objetivos que realmente son su//eh eso, su objetivo (…) espero que tenga muchos alumnos que se pongan a teclear por evitar eso, está imposible eh, bueno (Mexico, PUEB_H33_086)

 

“I: but, but well, I insist, the least important thing is the bull, eh, the least important thing for the anti-bullfighting people is whether the bulls are killed or not, I think there is much/much pretending and some other objectives that are really their//eh that, their objective (…) I hope you have many students who will start typing to avoid that, it is_.ESTAR impossible eh, well”

5. Discussion

Conclusions can be drawn from the empirical study findings described in the previous sections. Firstly, there is a connection between the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives that appear as predicates in the innovative construction estar + AP and the geographic distribution of this structure. Taking these two parameters together (lexical–syntactic class of the adjectival predicate and dialectal area where the innovative structure is documented), the following generalization is obtained and formulated as implicative hierarchies, regarding the extent of the innovative estar-structure in Latin American Spanish (in Generalization Ia, evaluative adjectives are considered as a macro-class; in Generalization Ib, subclasses of evaluative adjectives are taken into account). According to this hierarchy if, for example, relational adjectives are attested as predicates in the innovative structure in a specific area; then, the rest of preceding adjectival classes are also attested in the innovative estar-construction in that dialectal area.

• Generalization Ia (considering evaluative adjectives as a macro-class):

Age adjectives (documented in all areas in the innovative construction) > evaluative adjectives (all areas) > dimensional adjectives/property adjectives/non-qualifying (adverbial, relational and modal) adjectives used as predicates (documented in Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean areas)

• Generalization Ib (considering subclasses of evaluative adjectives):

Evaluative adjectives of the “Other” class (documented in all areas)/aesthetic evaluatives (all areas except for Chile, possibly due to the corpus size) > evaluative adjectives of personal judgement (Mexican and Central American, Caribbean, Andean areas) > extreme degree adjectives (documented in Mexican and Central American and Andean areas; their non-appearance in the Caribbean area may be due to the size of the corpus of this dialectal area)

We ran a chi-square test using adjectival class (Adjectival_Class) as the dependent nominal variable (evaluative adjectives were considered as a macro-class) and the geolectal area (Geolectal) as the independent nominal variable in the innovative use of estar.8 We found that there is a strong association between the variable adjectival class and the variable geolectal area, with Pearson χ² = 62.491, p < 0.001, and a Likelihood-ratio = 70.271, p < 0.001. In order to assess the confidence of the association between the two nominal variables, we evaluated the Goodman–Kruskal tau coefficient, 0.314, p < 0.001, and the Uncertainty coefficient, 0.300, p < 0.001. Therefore, we found a strong significant effect of the geolectal area in the distribution of the adjectival classes in the innovative use of estar across the Spanish American varieties. We are confident in rejecting the null hypothesis that the distribution of adjectival classes in the innovative use of estar across American geolectal areas is due to chance. The generalization (Ia) is statistically confirmed. This is shown graphically in Figure 1.

Therefore, the so-called innovative use of estar is a systematic phenomenon of syntactic variation characteristic of the Mexican and Central American area, also robust in the Caribbean and Andean areas and extending non-systematically to other dialectal areas. Regarding the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives, age adjectives and some subclasses of evaluative adjectives (aesthetic adjectives, and the heterogeneous class that we have termed “Other”) occur in innovative examples in all dialectal areas.

A second conclusion can be drawn from our study. If the relative percentage of standard-examples vs. innovative-examples included in the database for each class of adjectives is considered (recall that we are restricting ourselves here to those lexical items appearing at least once in the innovative structure), the hierarchy presented below is obtained (Generalization IIa includes evaluative adjectives as a macro-class; Generalization IIb takes into account subclasses of evaluative adjectives separately). Adjectival classes are presented in descending order, from highest to lowest percentage of innovative examples. Thus, the combination of adverbial, relational and modal adjectives used as predicates and age adjectives with estar seems to be a radical innovative use. At the other end of the hierarchy, property adjectives appear only in 29.2% of innovative structures vs. 70.8% of standard occurrences.

• Generalization IIa (considering evaluative adjectives as a macro-class):

Adverbial, relational and modal adjectives used as predicates (innovative examples: 10, 100%) > age adjectives (innovative examples 413, 98.6%; general examples 6, 1.4%) > dimensional adjectives (innovative examples 48, 80%; general examples 12, 20%) > evaluative adjectives (innovative examples 119, 55.6%; general examples 95, 44.4%) > property adjectives (innovative examples 42, 29.2%; general examples 102, 70.8%)

• Generalization IIb (considering subclasses of evaluative adjectives):

Adverbial, relational and modal adjectives used as predicates (innovative examples: 10, 100%) > evaluative adjectives—“Other” (innovative examples 20, 100%) > age adjectives (innovative examples 413, 98.6%; general examples 6, 1.4%) > evaluative adjectives of maximal degree (innovative examples 8, 88.9%; general examples 1, 11.1%) dimensional adjectives (innovative examples 48, 80%; general examples 12, 20%) > aesthetic evaluatives (innovative examples 41, 55.4%; general examples 33, 44.6%) > evaluative adjectives personal judgement (innovative examples 41, 40.2%; general examples 61, 59.8%) > property adjectives (innovative examples 42, 29.2%; general examples 102, 70.8%)

We ran a chi-square test using adjectival class (Adjectival_Class) as the independent nominal variable (evaluative adjectives were considered as a macro-class) and class using (Class_using) (general use of estar vs. innovative use of estar) as the dependent nominal variable. We found that there is a strong association between the variable adjectival class and the variable class using, with Pearson χ² = 329.106, p < 0.001, and a Likelihood-ratio = 368.938, p < 0.001. In order to assess the confidence of the association between the two nominal variables, we evaluated the Goodman–Kruskal tau coefficient, 0.389, p < 0.001, and the Uncertainty coefficient, 0.384, p < 0.001. Therefore, we found a strong significant effect of the adjectival classes on the distribution of the general vs. innovative use of estar across the geolectal areas. We are confident in rejecting the null hypothesis that the distribution of adjectival classes in the general vs. innovative use of estar across American geolectal areas is due to chance. This is shown in Figure 2.

Furthermore, the symmetrical Cramer V coefficient, 0.621, p < 0.001, suggests that the innovative use is a strong predictor of the adjective class in the varieties subject to study in this paper. That is, if an adjective is found in the innovative use of estar in the geolectal varieties studied, chances are very high that this adjective is not a property adjective. This is show graphically in Figure 3.

Statistical tests confirm that the distribution of property adjectives and the general vs. innovative use of estar is not significant. We ran the Goodman–Kruskal test to determine the strength of the association within the class of property adjectives of the dependent nominal variable geolectal area (Geolectal), representing the linguistic areas under study, and the independent nominal variable, class using (Class_using), representing the general vs. innovative use of estar. The result of the Goodman–Kruskal tau coefficient, 0.025, gives an approximate significance of 0.006, hence p > 0.001. The uncertainty coefficient of Geolectal(dependent var.)*Class_using(independent var.) gives a result of 0.046, with an approximate significance of 0.004; hence, p > 0.001. The null hypothesis that the use of the property adjectives in the innovative use of estar in the Preseea corpus is due to chance cannot be rejected.

In order to elaborate further on Generalization II, each class of adjectives is examined separately as follows:

• Adverbial, relational, and modal adjectives used as predicates: These adjectives only combine with ser in copulative sentences in general/standard Spanish. Their combination with estar is restricted to the Mexican and Central American area, and secondarily to the Caribbean and Andean areas.
• Evaluative adjectives of the “Other” class: The number of innovative examples with adjectives of this class exceeds the number of standard examples in all dialectal areas. Moreover, no other adjectives of this class were documented in the corpus exclusively in standard estar-examples. It should also be noted that many of the lexical items in this class only co-occur with ser in copular sentences in general/standard Spanish (e.g., significativo “significant”, importante “important”).
• Age adjectives: The proportion of innovative examples with adjectives of this class compared to the standard examples in the database is 98.6% vs. 1.4%. The innovative structure is documented in all dialectal areas. Furthermore, there are no further age adjectives in the corpus that appear exclusively in examples illustrating the standard use of estar + A structures.
• Extreme degree adjectives: nine examples of this class were included in the database, eight of which are innovative examples in the Mexican, Central American and Andean areas. However, further lexical items (18) appeared exclusively in standard estar-sentences in the corpus, with a total of 107 examples.
• Dimensional adjectives: The number of innovative examples with adjectives of this class was found to exceed the number of standard examples only in the Mexican and Central American area (but not in the Caribbean and Andean areas). There are also further adjectives of this class documented only in standard examples in the corpus in all dialectal areas.
• Aesthetic evaluative adjectives: The number of innovative examples with adjectives of this class exceeds that of standard examples in the Mexican and Central American area and in the Caribbean area (also in the Rio de la Plata area, although there are only four examples ascribed to this area). No further aesthetic adjectives were documented in the corpus exclusively in standard examples.
• In the case of evaluative adjectives of personal judgment, the number of standard examples exceeds the number of innovative examples in all areas. Further adjectives belonging to this class were documented in the corpus exclusively in standard examples.
• Finally, regarding adjectives expressing properties, the number of standard examples exceeds that of innovative examples in all the areas in which both uses are documented (Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean areas). Additionally, there is a high number of adjectives of this class in the corpus documented only in standard examples in all dialectal areas.

Therefore, as an overall generalization, it can be concluded that the innovative use of estar-sentences is (almost) categorical with adverbial, relational, and modal adjectives used as predicates, evaluative adjectives belonging to the class “Other”, as well as age adjectives, followed in second place by dimensional and aesthetic adjectives (in the Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean areas). The remaining classes occur to a lesser extent in the innovative structure and have also been documented in examples illustrating the general use of sentences with estar in all dialect areas. Therefore, the lexical–syntactic classes to which adjectives belong seem to be relevant to understanding the geographical distribution of the innovative estar-construction across Latin American Spanish varieties.

Just for illustration, we included here the statistical analysis of age adjectives. Within this class, we ran a χ² test with Class_using (general vs. innovative use of estar) as the dependent nominal variable and Geolectal (linguistic area) as the independent variable. The result is highly significant, with χ² = 86.943 and Likelihood ratio = 19.108, p < 0.001. Therefore, the association between the two variables within the class of age adjectives is also highly significant: the geolectal area (Mexican and Central American, Caribbean and Andean linguistic areas) is a strong predictor of the innovative use of age adjectives in estar copular sentences (recall Note 7).

A final observation from our database is the alternation between the copulas ser and estar in the innovative contexts, attested with all the lexical classes of adjectives analyzed, sometimes within the elocution of the same speaker. This is illustrated with age adjectives, (36), and property adjectives, (37), below; see also (33) above. Hesitation in the choice of the copula in innovative contexts is also documented, as already noted in the literature (Ortiz-López 2000; García-Márkina 2013, p. 2.5; Sánchez-Alonso 2018), see (38) and (39) below.

• (36) E: ¿era mayor?/I: chs, claro/tenía qué//ni tan mayor porque tenía creo que veintidós años/E: sí estaba joven/I: estaba joven/E: sí era joven//a ver/es decir giremos un poco la conversación (Colombia, BARR_M12_026)

“E: was he old?/I: yeah, sure/he was//not that old because I think he was 22 years old/E: yes he was_.ESTAR young/I: he was_.ESTAR young/E: yes he was_.SER young//let’s see/let’s turn the conversation a bit”

• (37) E: pero tú/el centro ¿en qué sentido?/¿tú cómo te sentías?/I: les causaba mucha curiosidad porque desde chiquita fui muy/muy chistosa/¿no?/o sea estaba muy chistosa y era la única negrita de todas entonces/(…) (Mexico, MEXI_M12_048)

“I: but you/the center of attention in what sense/how did you feel?/I: I caused them a lot of curiosity because since I was a little girl I was_.SER very/very funny/wasn’t I/I was_.ESTAR very funny and I was the only black girl of all of them so”

• (38) I: ya teníamos casita/era/E: ¿estaba grande la casa?/I: era <alargamiento/>/<silencio/> estaba amplia/estaba amplia/pero teníamos ¿qué?/dos recamaras/estaba bien (Mexico, MXLI_H32_018)

“I: we already had a little house/it was_.SER E: was_.ESTAR the house big? I: it was_.SER <lengthening/>/<silence/> it was._ESTAR big/it was_.ESTAR big/but we had what?/two bedrooms/it was fine”

• (39) I: …había tres empresas de Chromaisin/y (…) yo iba y capacitaba a toda la gente de allá (…) pero bien/era/estaba suave mi trabajo (Mexico, MXLI_M33_035)

“I:…there were three Chromaisin companies/and (…) I would go and train all the people there (…) but well/it was_.SER/it was_.ESTAR soft my job”

6. Towards an Explanation

Although the aim of this article is fundamentally descriptive, in this section, the explanatory potential of the different types of proposal that exist in the literature will be compared to account for the properties of the innovative estar-construction and for its coexistence with the standard structure in Latin American Spanish.

A first kind of proposals argues that the innovative estar-construction reflects a stage within a diachronic process of neutralization in the Spanish copular system (Silva-Corvalán 1986; De Jonge 1993a, 1993b; Gutiérrez 1994; Alfaraz 2012; among others). This neutralization process would cause the progressive loss of the selection restrictions of the standard Spanish copula estar, so that estar would be progressively invading the semantic domain of ser. In terms of the modes-of-comparison approach to the ser/estar distinction, this process of neutralization would imply that estar is innovatively used in contexts of between-individuals comparison.

This proposal, which ultimately defends the existence of an ongoing process of linguistic change in Spanish, can easily explain both the alternation and speaker-hesitation between the copulas ser and innovative-estar described in the previous section as well as the different geographic distribution of the innovative estar-structure and its co-occurrence in all geographic areas with the standard structure. However, the generalizations regarding the unequal behavior of the different lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives in the innovative estar-construction do not seem to be easily explainable in this proposal. Furthermore, this neutralization-based proposal should incorporate a way to account for the meaning component of speaker-subjectivity, which, as noted above, is associated with the innovative estar-construction.

A second group of proposals focuses on the subjective speaker-oriented perspective on the predication that is associated with the innovative estar-construction and explains it as resulting from a pragmatic process (Brown and Cortés-Torres 2012; García-Márkina 2013; Sánchez-Alonso et al. 2016; Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Escandell-Vidal 2023). From this approach, it is argued that the copula estar has unique semantics across all varieties of Spanish; in other words, estar requires the predication to be linked to an anchor point. The most formalized proposal within this approach is that of Sánchez-Alonso et al. (2016) and Sánchez-Alonso (2018). Sánchez-Alonso et al. (2016) defend that “estar differs from ser in presupposing that P(x) [i.e., the attribution of certain degree of the property P to the subject of predication x] holds contingently at an index i”. If an evaluation index i is composed of the following parameters i<t,w,l,c>—t: time interval, w: world, l: location, c: function that assigns the positive degree of the gradable predicate––, “a proposition of the form P(x) holds contingently at an index i whenever there is an i’ accessible from the evaluation index i, varying only along one contextually-determined parameter”. Thus, a sentence like Ahora estoy triste “Now I am_.ESTAR sad” is true at an index i if there is a temporally accessible index i’, that is, an index i’ whose parameter t’ is accessible, in which the proposition is false. Also, a sentence like La carretera está peligrosa más adelante “The road is_.ESTAR dangerous ahead” is true at i if there is a spatially accessible index i’ in which the proposition is false (that is, an index i’ whose parameter l’ is accessible). Similarly, a sentence like El jamón está riquísimo “The ham is_.ESTAR very tasty” (the same reasoning would hold for La boda estuvo preciosa “The wedding was_.ESTAR so precious”) is true in i if there are “modally accessible indices at which the predication is false”, that is, if the proposition is false at an index i’ whose parameter w’ is accessible. What makes the parameters t’ and l’ (in i’) accessible from an index i is their adjacency to the parameters t and l (temporal or spatial adjacency). “The parameter w’ of i’ is accessible if it is among the most similar worlds to the world w of i”. Access to w’ “comes from the doxastic alternatives of the speaker at the time before the utterance time”. All these possibilities would configure the standard use of estar.

According to these authors, who compare Mexican Spanish with Iberian Spanish (i.e., Peninsular or European Spanish) in their study, the innovative use is linked to the modal parameter and derives from the proposal that the speakers of innovative varieties “are able to accommodate the contingency-presupposition without relying on explicit contextual cues to a greater extent than” standard speakers.

This type of approach easily explains the subjective interpretation associated with the innovative estar-structures, but it should also explicitly explain how the ability to accommodate a pragmatic presupposition can be formalized as a fact of geolectal variation. Similarly, this type of proposal, in its present formulation, cannot accommodate the lexical–syntactic generalizations made in the preceding section regarding the unequal behavior of different classes of adjectives in the innovative structure or the relevance of the different semantic types of the subject of predication.

The intuition that innovative estar-sentences express the subjective point of view of the speaker about the predication, comparing alternative possible (normal) worlds, is also developed in Gumiel-Molina et al. (2020, 2023) and is explicitly formalized in Moreno-Quibén (2022, chp. 5) within a modes-of-comparison approach to the ser/estar distinction. As described in Section 2, adjectives of personal taste, adjectives of personal judgment and extreme degree adjectives, which are characterized by having an experiencer/judge argument in their argument structure in general/standard Spanish, give rise to a judge/experiencer-oriented predication in estar-sentences in all dialects. Within the modes-of-comparison approach, in standard/general examples such as La tarta está sabrosa “The cake is_.ESTAR tasty”, Construir el muro estuvo fácil “Building the wall was_.ESTAR easy” or La boda estuvo fantástica “The wedding was_.ESTAR fantastic”, there is no comparison between counterparts of the subject of predication regarding the property expressed by the adjective. It is the experiencer/judge argument of the adjective that provides the necessary counterparts to form the within-the-individual comparison class in estar-sentences. The comparison is thus established between the evaluation of the property that the experiencer/judge makes with regards to the entity in the sentence evaluation index and an alternative evaluation that a counterpart of the experiencer/judge might make in a different evaluation index (note that this semantics is similar to the one proposed in Sánchez-Alonso et al. (2016)). As a result of the fact that the experiencer/judge is by default coindexed with the speaker, the sentences express perspectivized assertions and subjective judgments where the speaker expresses his or her point of view on the attribution of the property in the index of evaluation (see Moreno-Quibén 2022, chp. 5 for a detailed explanation of this proposal).

To account for the innovative structure attested in Latin American Spanish and the unequal occurrence in it of the different lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives, Gumiel-Molina et al. (2020, 2023) and Moreno-Quibén (2022) start from García-Márkina’s (2013) intuition that the innovative presence of aesthetic adjectives in estar-sentences (recall (15), (16), (17)) is an extension of the behavior of personal taste and personal judgment predicates in standard copular structures.

Specifically, these authors claim that aesthetic adjectives appear in the innovative construction in Latin American varieties as a result of a geographically conditioned process of argument augmentation that would gradually affect the natural classes of adjectives closest to those that have an experiencer/judge argument in their argument structure in standard Spanish. Thus, this process of diatopically conditioned argument augmentation would extend from the predicates of personal taste, personal judgment, and maximum degree to the rest of the evaluative adjectives (aesthetic, other) and, eventually, to other lexical classes (note, for example, that many of the property adjectives mentioned in Section 4.4. have an evaluative component—alegre “happy”, cómodo “comfortable”, triste “sad”––). The process of argument augmentation allows the experiencer/judge to contribute counterparts to form the within-individual comparison class in the innovative structure, ultimately giving rise to the subjective or perspectivized interpretation of the predication (see Gumiel-Molina et al. 2023 and Moreno-Quibén 2022 for a precise formalization of this proposal). Thus, the innovative estar-sentences would not derive from a process of semantic neutralization in the Spanish copular system nor from a pragmatic process subject to dialectal variation, but rather from lexical–syntactic variation (Demonte 2015; Francez and Koontz-Garboden 2017) that implies the modification in the argument possibilities of some natural classes of adjectives in specific varieties.9

If the process of argument augmentation is a phenomenon of lexical–syntactic variation that spreads gradually; it can be explained that: (a) the innovative structure is documented unequally in different dialectal areas; (b) the unequal distribution of different lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives in the innovative structure; (c) the fact that, within the same class, different lexical items appear in the innovative structure to a different extent; in this sense, Brown and Cortés-Torres (2012) had already pointed out that, within the same lexical class, central or prototypical adjectives, i.e., those most frequent or with the broadest meaning, are more systematically found in the innovative construction with estar than adjectives that are more peripheral within the class; finally (d) the coexistence of standard and innovative estar-structures in the same dialectal areas could also be explained.

However, this proposal, in its present formulation, cannot easily explain the appearance of age adjectives in the innovative construction, since estar-predications with this class of adjectives in Latin American varieties do not seem to be evaluative judgments (scalar variation is not possible). Note that in the following example (recall (7) above), one of the speakers is right and the other is necessarily wrong, contrary to the “faultless disagreement” reading typical of subjective predications (Lasersohn 2005, 2009): Speaker A: La bebé tenía tres meses, estaba chiquita “The baby was_.ESTAR 3 month old. She was small”—Speaker B: No, no lo estaba “No, she was._ESTAR not”.

In fact, on the grounds of any of the three types of approaches presented, a complete understanding of the empirical paradigm described in the previous sections necessarily requires a deeper analysis of age adjectives in order to determine whether the occurrence of these adjectives in innovative estar-sentences can be explained in the same way as the innovative use of evaluative or property adjectives, or whether we are dealing with a phenomenon that is only superficially unitary.

Similarly, a deeper analysis of estar-sentences with adjectives that only combine with ser in general/standard Spanish is needed, such as adverbial, relational, and modal adjectives, or specific lexical items within some other classes (such as importante “important” within the evaluative class). In this sense, a complete understanding of the phenomenon called the innovative use of estar seems to require a careful comparison of the use of copular ser-constructions in the same dialectal areas. Further research is thus needed in this regard to clarify whether the innovative use of estar implies not only lexical–syntactic variation in the classes of adjectives appearing in the innovative estar-structures but also a change in the syntactic–semantic properties of the copula estar in (at least some of) the American varieties.

7. Conclusions

In this paper, the so-called innovative estar-sentences found in Latin American Spanish varieties, as opposed to the standard or general estar-sentences, has been examined from a descriptive perspective. Specifically, based on the Preseea corpus, we have offered an exhaustive and updated characterization of the extent of this structure in Latin American Spanish, considering together both the lexical–syntactic classes of adjectives that appear as predicates in innovative estar-sentences and its geographical distribution in the American dialectal varieties.

From a theoretical perspective, in light of the generalizations established, a critical evaluation has been made of the existing proposals in the literature that explain the properties—both syntactic and semantic—of innovative structures. Among the topics identified for future research, it seems necessary to carry out further investigation into the behavior of adjectives that appear with estar in the innovative Spanish varieties but that are only combined with ser in standard Spanish. This is the case of age adjectives when they express purely chronological age, some subclasses of evaluative adjectives, as well as non-qualifying adjectives used as predicates. On the other hand, although the areal characterization of the phenomenon seems clear, it must be taken into account that, as pointed out by De Jonge (1993a) and Malaver (2009), innovative examples with age adjectives are documented in the Peninsular Spanish of Malaga and Granada. Moreover, García-Márkina (2013) points out that the adjectives gordo “fat” and suave “soft” allow the so-called innovative use also in the Peninsular Spanish; thus, when meeting someone for the first time, one can say ¡Qué gordo está ese hombre! “What a fat man he is_.ESTAR”, or when touching a cloth for the first time, one can utter: Mira que suave está esto “Look how soft it is_.ESTAR”. Thus, an exploration of the so-called innovative use in Peninsular Spanish should also be carried out in order to have a complete and thorough overview of the phenomenon studied here.

Finally, considering some of the generalizations presented, and from a much broader perspective, it is worth asking—as a reviewer explicitly notes—whether the phenomenon studied should continue to be considered nowadays an innovation, restricted to certain sociolinguistically characterized groups, or whether it is already part of the linguistic norm within the geographical areas in which it is documented. The answer to all these questions will require the collaboration of theoretical linguists and sociolinguists.