CAPITALIZATION
Christopher J. Pountain
Queens' College, Cambridge
1.
Introduction
Use
of the term ‘capitalization’ is an attempt to label the historical process by
which a linguistic feature which already exists in a language comes to be
substantially exploited for wider purposes, sometimes simply making overt
distinctions which were previously covert, but sometimes apparently creating
new expressive possibilities. A
convenient analogy, which is offered for ease of conceptualization but like
most analogies must not be pushed too far, is that of a family’s use of a home
computer which has been bought initially as a word processor; this device is
soon pressed into service as a database for addresses and telephone numbers, as
a spreadsheet for accounts and as a games machine: once there, its
possibilities are exploited for all they are worth. Some of its tasks are substitutional, and therefore represent no
real innovation in the family’s daily life; but gradually it is realised that
the computer allows totally new and hitherto undreamed of possibilities, such
as desktop publishing or access to the Internet.
I
will further suggest that capitalization plays an important rôle in giving a
language what has sometimes been called its génie,
or characteristic cut. This phenomenon
was elegantly, and relatively neutrally, described by Voltaire (1879:557):
On appelle génie
d’une langue son aptitude à dire de la manière la plus courte et la plus
harmonieuse ce que les autres langues expriment moins heureusement.
‘We call the génie of a language its aptitude for
saying in the shortest and most harmonious way things that other languages
express less happily.’[1]
The
term ‘genius’ of a language was also used and extensively discussed by Sapir
(1921:60):
All languages evince
a curious instinct for the development of one or more particular grammatical
processes at the expense of others, tending always to lose sight of any
explicit functional value that the process may have had in the first instance,
delighting, it would seem, in the sheer play of its means of expression.
In
my notion of capitalization, the original functional value of the particular
feature is not lost, but otherwise Sapir’s description captures the notion in
many important respects, and I shall return to it later.
2.
A case-study: Spanish ser and estar
Without
further ado, I shall present as an illustrative example of capitalization the
development of the copular verbs ser
and estar in Castilian Spanish. Capitalization on the ser/estar opposition is relatively easily observable since it takes
place during a well-documented period of Spanish linguistic history which
includes the present day. Chronology is
within limits able to be established, and we can clearly see a steady growth in
the direct exploitation of the opposition.
In
what follows I have inevitably had to suppress some philological details, since
I want to bring into focus the main lines of development as they appear to be
relevant to capitalization.
2.1
Lexical properties
The
verb ser broadly continues the functions
of Latin ESSE, despite the fact that its suppletive paradigm in Castilian
derives both from forms of Latin ESSE ‘to be’ and from those of Latin SEDERE
‘to sit’. The initial innovatory
movement we have to consider is in the range of estar, which derives from Latin STARE ‘to stand, to be in a place,
to stay’. In the earliest Castilian
Romance texts, estar is typically
used to indicate the location of an animate subject; it has already undergone
some semantic bleaching in that it does not at this point have unequivocally
the meaning of ‘to stand’, which is expressed (and is still expressed today) by
a paraphrase such as estar de pie
(lit. ‘to be on one’s feet’). Ser retains no meaning of ‘to sit’,
though there is a doublet development of SEDERE to seer, which is one of a wide range of locative copulas including estar in Old Spanish; seer eventually becomes obsolete
(Pountain 1982). I mention these
details to make it clear that there is in all likelihood no residual bipolar
semantic contrast between ser and estar with the meanings ‘to sit’ and ‘to
stand’ at the time I will argue the capitalization process begins.
2.2
Ser and estar with past participles
I
thus begin the historical trajectory of estar
at the critical stage, identified by Bouzet (1953:49), at which estar extended its semantic range from
association with adverbs and prepositional adverbial phrases which had a
literal locative meaning to what may conveniently be thought of as metaphorical
locative complements enshrining the notion of physical or moral state, such as en peligro ‘in danger’, en gran deleit ‘in great delight’, en dubda ‘in doubt’, en quexa ‘in complaint, complaining’,
etc. From here it is but a short step
semantically to the cooccurrence of estar
with past participles (PP) with a similar meaning, e.g.
(1) Estó agora mucho afincado
de mengua de dineros (Conde Lucanor,
13th Cent.)
‘I am now very hard pressed
by lack of money’
The
possibility of the occurrence of a semantically weakened estar in this new syntactic frame with the past participle is
crucial, since ser could already
appear in the same context, forming the general Romance periphrastic passive
auxiliary.[2] There subsequently developed a systematic
aspectual opposition within the passive between estar + PP and ser + PP, estar + PP denoting the stative result
of a verbal event and ser + PP simply
having the aspectual value of the corresponding active verb. A modern example of this is
(2) El pan es vendido en todas partes
‘Bread is sold everywhere’
El
pan está vendido
‘The
bread is (already) sold’
The
generalization of estar + PP in this
way therefore represents the creation of a new oppositional possibility, albeit
one which is already covertly expressed in many languages: in English, for example,
the ambiguity of ‘the door is shut’ is revealed only by extended contexts such
as ‘the door is shut every day at nine’ (Spanish: la puerta es cerrada todos los días a las nueve) versus ‘the door
is shut and cannot be opened’ (Spanish: la
puerta está cerrada y no se puede abrir).
The
exploitation of the ser/estar
opposition with past participle complements has reached an extremely
interesting stage in modern Spanish.
There is an evident tension between what might be taken to be the
‘manifest destiny’ of the opposition (that is, the development of a ser/estar-passive contrast for all
transitive verbs in all tenses) and a number of remaining constraints which
preclude this result. Nevertheless,
there is some evidence that the process of capitalization in this area is
continuing. In Pountain (1993) I
identified a number of aspectually-governed constraints on the use of both the ser-passive and the estar-passive (as we may now call them) which I will briefly
summarize.
A.
The ser-passive of a verb of dynamic
lexical aspect (Comrie 1976:48-51; Quirk et al. 1972:39-40) used in an
imperfective tense (the Present or the Imperfect) yields, unless further
adverbially qualified, a repetitive aspectual interpretation:
(3) El helado es / era comido por la niña
‘The ice-cream is / was eaten by the little-girl’ (understand an adverbial such as
‘frequently’, ‘every day’, etc.)
B.
The estar-passive cannot have an
overt agent expressed (in any tense) unless its verb is imperfective in lexical
aspect, e.g.
(4) La ventana está / estaba / había estado bloqueada
por óxido
‘The
window is / was / had been blocked
by rust’
but
La ventana está / estaba / había estado abierta (*por la profesora)
‘The window is / was / had been opened (by the teacher)’
These
constraints therefore severely limit the oppositional possibilities of the
contrast between the ser- and estar-passives. Increasingly, however (though for the time
being this appears to be register-specific), examples of the ‘banned’ combinations
are found, with apparently new aspectual readings. In the written language, especially journalistic register, the
imperfect tense forms of the ser-passive
with a dynamic verb may yield an imperfective aspectual reading, e.g.:
(5) Vi que en aquel momento la florista
gitana que se ponía enfrente los días de fiesta era recogida por su invisible marido en su furgoneta limpia y
moderna (Javier Marías, Todas las Almas,
232)
‘I saw that at that moment the gipsy
florist who used to stand opposite on public holidays was being picked up by her invisible husband in his clean, modern
van’
Some
modern journalistic uses of the estar-passive
with verbs of punctual lexical aspect seem to come close to being equatable
with a perfective passive:
(6) El nuevo convenio deberá estar aprobado por las Cortes antes del
próximo día 14 de mayo (El País,
31.10.87)
‘The new agreement will have to have been approved by the Cortes
before 14 May next’
Such
data is tangible evidence of continuing capitalization on the use of ser and estar with past participle complements by the ongoing filling of
structural gaps.
2.3
Ser and estar with adjectives
Returning
to the main diachronic story, the extension of estar to past participle complements led naturally to its
availability with adjectival complements, and hence, because ser was already available with
adjectival complements, to the eventual establishment of an opposition between ser and estar in this context too.
The textual record shows the use of estar
with adjective complements to be subsequent chronologically to its use with
past participles. The link between past
participle and adjectival complements is primarily a syntactic one: past
participles were already adjectival in nature to the extent that they were able
to be used as attributive adjectives -
indeed, it is this fact which permits the emergence of the periphrastic perfect
tenses of Romance, by the reanalysis of the adjectival past participle as an
integral part of the verb-form. The
gain in productivity of the ser/estar
contrast with adjective complements between 16th-Century Spanish and modern
Spanish is astonishing. It is easy,
however, to overstate the contrast: at the time of the very first examples of estar with adjective complements
(Pountain 1982:157), the adjectives encountered are either adjectives which are
morphologically indistinguishable from past participles (espantado ‘frightened’, ensañada
‘enraged’) or adjectives which are very closely linked semantically with the
idea of a resultant state (perplejo
‘perplexed’, lleno ‘full’, discorde ‘in disagreement’) and it is
doubtful whether at first any true minimal pairs were available. Even today, the relation between noun and
adjective often determines the choice of copula, as in pairs like la pregunta es vacía (inherent property:
‘the question is empty’) versus la casa
está vacía (state: ‘the house is empty’).
But the contrastive nature of ser/estar
+ adjective complement is nowadays firmly established with such pairs as the
following, which can be differentiated only lexically in English: ser/estar despierto (‘to be lively /
awake’), listo (‘clever / ready’), seguro (‘reliable / sure’), etc. Furthermore, it is being increasingly
exploited through the ‘subjective’ or ‘impressionistic’ use of estar in such cases as está muy joven (‘he’s looking very
young’), estás muy española (‘you’re
behaving in a very Spanish way’), and such journalistic examples as
(7) M. Thatcher, especialista en
imposibilitar el consenso con su intransigencia y estrecho egoísmo británico, estuvo más flexible (El País 7.12.87)
‘M. Thatcher, a specialist in making
consensus impossible with her intransigence and narrow British selfishness, was
more flexible’ (= behaved in a more
flexible way)
It
is probably symptomatic of such capitalization being in progress that the
pursuit of a straightforward principle which will encapsulate the nature of the
present-day contrast between ser and estar with adjectives has proved a
somewhat vain task. The first stage in
the process is that ser + adjective
is progressively restricted to denoting what may be construed as an inherent
quality of the subject noun, estar +
adjective representing the past participle-like notion of resultant state. But estar
+ past participle has now extended its semantic range to include many notions
of ‘non-inherentness’, such as accidental quality, impression or atypical
behaviour. Again, the evidence seems to
suggest that Spanish may be moving towards a position in which estar is becoming available with a wider
range of noun-adjective relations, so filling structural gaps and chanelling
out new bases for contrast between the copulas.
2.4
Collateral developments
Capitalization
on the ser/estar contrast has gone
much further even than this relatively familiar data in Spanish, however. In two areas of Spanish which I have studied
during the last few years the existence of the ser/estar contrast seems to have collaterally facilitated the
creation of new constructions in the language.
2.4.1
Inceptive verbs: ponerse
The
first is in the area of inceptive verbs (verbs of becoming), a complex semantic
area of Spanish where many verbal expressions and morphological devices render
what is in some languages, including English, representable as a unitary
notion. Inceptive verbs are obviously
closely linked to copulas, both semantically and syntactically. A significant subset of inceptive
expressions in Spanish are the reflexive verbs hacerse (lit. ‘to make oneself’) and volverse (lit. ‘to turn oneself’: also tornarse in the older language) which are highly versatile
syntactically in that they take both noun and adjective complements, but differ
semantically in that, broadly speaking, hacerse
is used to indicate a natural or expected process while volverse indicates a more general transformation. To this subset there is added, from about
the Sixteenth Century, ponerse (lit.
‘to put oneself’), which is restricted to adjective complements which denote a
state. In Pountain (1984; 1992) I
present a number of arguments for concluding that the introduction of the ponerse inceptive, and hence the
possibility of an opposition between ponerse
+ adjective and hacerse or volverse + adjective, goes hand in hand
with the emergence of a ser/estar +
adjective opposition. The distribution
of ponerse and estar with adjective complements is indeed remarkably close, a
relation also drawn by Luján (1980:22-9).
We appear therefore to be seeing here the extension of an opposition
created within one area of the language to another area which closely parallels
it.
The
second area of interest is that of adjective negation (Pountain 1993). This again is another complex area of
Spanish, where prefixes such as des-
and in- and the preadjectival
elements no, poco and nada carry out
negation of adjectives according to semantic constraints associated with the
adjectives they modify. Into this
repertoire comes the curious and, significantly, peculiarly Spanish
construction sin (‘without’) +
infinitive with passive value, e.g.
(8) Este problema está sin resolver
‘This problem is unsolved’ (lit. ‘without to solve’)
Documentary
evidence for the passive sin +
infinitive construction is elusive, but, so far as can be judged from the admittedly
somewhat scanty evidence available, the appearance of this construction once
again parallels the establishment of the ser/estar
contrast with adjective complements. To
understand the development of sin +
infinitive, I have suggested that the ser/estar
distinction is of particular relevance.
Sin + infinitive can be the
complement of only a restricted range of verbs, and significantly, as in (8),
of estar but not ser. It will be remembered
that estar associates with its
various complement types in the following schematic historical order: (a)
locative adverbs, (b) locative adverbial prepositional phrases, (c) past
participles, (d) adjectives. Sin + infinitive, as a preposition +
verbal noun, falls naturally into this sequence at the stage when locative
adverbial prepositional phrases begin to admit metaphorical locative
expressions; as such, sin with an
active value infinitive would have been able to take its place amongst the
complements of estar early on. As the range of complements of estar extended to past participles with
their characteristic passive value, so perhaps sin + infinitive was drawn into a passive value usage as it
steadily moved towards a purely adjectival function, demonstrated today by its
attributive as well as predicative use.
Today sin + infinitive with
passive value effectively forms the prospective negative counterpart of past
participles which indicate a reversible state, e.g.:
(9) Esta pared está pintada
‘This wall is painted’ (state, reversible by being painted)
Esta
pared está sin pintar
‘This
wall is unpainted’ (prospective
negation, implying ‘yet to be painted’)
3.
The nature of capitalization
I
now want to reflect on the anatomy of capitalization as illustrated in this
case-study. I will do this first from
the point of view of the mechanisms of change involved, and secondly from the
point of view of motivation.
3.1
Mechanism of change
The
capitalization process can be seen to consist in fact of a composite of changes
which individually are familiar to historical linguists.
3.1.1
Grammaticalisation
The
emergence of the estar-passive, like
the earlier development of the ser-passive,
is a process of incipient grammaticalisation whose term may be expected to be
the creation of a new morphological form.
The grammaticalisation is, however, as yet relatively weak, and some of
the characteristic developments associated with grammaticalisation are not
unambivalently present. Estar has not undergone phonetic
reduction. There is still some
competition among potential aspectual auxiliaries of stativity (19): quedar (‘to stay, remain’) in particular
remains a rival, though a semantically more marked and less frequent rival, to estar.
The original locative semantic value of estar is bleached in this context to the point of its signalling no
more than stative aspect; this, however, as we have seen, began to occur before
the onset of capitalization, though it may have been a feature which
propitiated it. It is possible that stronger
grammaticalisation is held in check by the transparency of the continuing
opposition between ser and estar in other contexts.
3.1.2
Reanalysis
The
extension of estar to adjective
complements, as already observed, may be seen, at least in part, as the result
of of the past participle being alternatively analysable as an adjective (it
must not be forgotten, however, that there is also a close semantic parallel
between past participles and adjectives denoting a resultant state). Moreover, there were (and are) many
denominal adjectival forms in -do
which are superficially morphologically identical to the deverbal past
participles : these no doubt became available as complements of estar by formal analogy, e.g. desdichado (‘unfortunate’: denominal
from desdicha ‘misfortune’). Indeed, the passive construction with a ser or estar auxiliary is nowadays often constructionally
indistinguishable from ser/estar with
an adjective complement: está cansado
can be construed either as a stative passive (‘he is in a state of
having-been-tired’) or as a copula + adjective structure (‘he is tired’).[3]
3.1.3
Adaptation: association and exaptation
It
is possible to view the successive stages through which estar has evolved as essentially a lexical semantic history
describable in terms of ‘association’ or enchainement
(Ullmann 1970:211; Haiman 1985:60). It
would be difficult to perceive synchronically any semantic relation between the
two end-points of the evolution of estar
described above, i.e., between estar as
a characteristic locative copula and its present-day ‘impressionistic’ value
with adjective complements. But the
intervening stages through which estar
has passed (its use with metaphorical locatives, with past participles, with
adjectives denoting state) are semantically linked just as surely as any
sequence of change in lexical meaning is linked. In the case of estar,
however, the successive stages of its history remain enshrined in the language;
it is a history of expansion, without significant loss, of functions. This is not, therefore, the typical case of
association characterised by Haiman (1985:19) as
the process whereby
grammatical categories, like words, may regularly acquire logically unrelated
meanings as a result of fortuitous or accidental associations between their
essential (or core) meanings, and these other peripheral meanings.
In
a similar way, although the exploitative nature of capitalization recalls
immediately the process of exaptation (Lass 1990; Vincent 1992), there is a crucial
difference in that exaptation presupposes the obsolescence of an existing
feature which is then redeployed for other, possibly already existing,
purposes, whereas in capitalization an existing feature is deployed for
additional, but not already existing, purposes.
3.2
Motivation
It
would seem, therefore, that capitalization makes use of a number of individual
kinds of change which in different ways exploit the same linguistic
feature. It is not, therefore, to be
seen necessarily as a separate type of linguistic change, but rather as a
particular pattern of change. I want
lastly to touch on the question of the motivation for capitalization.
3.2.1
Isomorphism and iconicity
Capitalization
in the case of the ser/estar
distinction appears overall to militate against isomorphism. Estar
in modern Spanish has come to have a complex array of usage which it has proved
impossible to link to one unified meaning, even though its semantic trajectory
can be relatively easily traced and remains vestigially evident in the
synchronic structure of the language.
Indeed, it is the pursuit of the chimera of isomorphism which has led to
such disastrous results in the area of language teaching, where semantic
principles have been proposed irrespective of syntactic considerations. Thus ser
is often said to be associated with the notion of an inherent property, which
indeed it often is in the case of adjectival complements (Juan es colombiano ‘Juan is a Colombian’, la nieve es blanca ‘snow is white’); but a nominal complement, be
it inherent or non-inherent in nature, always requires ser, for estar simply
does not take nominal complements. Estar is sometimes associated with the
notion of impermanence, and again, this is appropriate for its use with some
adjectival complements: thus el suelo
está sucio ‘the floor is dirty’ may be felt to be an essentially transient
state of affairs. But there are
striking counterexamples to this proposed isomorphism which immediately reveal
its inappropriateness: nothing could be more permanent than Franco está muerto ‘Franco is dead’ or el Museo del Prado está en Madrid ‘the
Prado Museum is in Madrid’. Even the
attempt to characterize the values of ser
and estar within individual
context-types is not always obviously more congenial to isomorphism. Non-native learners of Spanish have long
wrestled with the apparent arbitrariness of why rico ‘rich’, viejo ‘old’,
etc. are apparently viewed as ‘inherent’ properties of people (since they are
used with ser) while contento ‘happy’ is viewed as
‘non-inherent’ (since it is used with estar).
At
the same time, ser and estar are never commutable,[4]
and so the formal contrast between the two is an icon of meaning difference,
even if the terms of that difference are not consistently isomorphically
quantifiable. Indeed, the essence of
capitalization is that the exploiting of the formal contrast draws along with
it the requirement of a semantic contrast.
Thus while ser rico has the
meaning of ‘to be rich’ in the economic sense (whether inherently or
temporarily), estar rico is typically
used of food with the meaning ‘to be tasty’; but there is now the possibility
of a true minimal contrast between ser
and estar with rico since estar rico is
also applied to people, usually little children or young women, with the
meaning ‘to be attractive’. In this
context, ser rico clearly does not
imply estar rico, nor vice
versa. There are large numbers of such
examples, where the semantic values of ser
and estar with the same adjectival
complement appear to be quantifiable essentially in ad hoc terms, but where the semantic differential is clear.
Capitalization
may therefore lead to the remapping, or reiconising, of certain semantic
contrasts. But it is not obvious that
it brings about a gain in iconicity or that the process itself is iconically
motivated.
3.2.2
Economy
Capitalization
appears at first sight to be the very antithesis of economically motivated
change. The distinctions made between
the two Spanish copulas may be viewed in many instances as redundant: it does
not occur to English speakers, for instance, that the child was frightened is ambiguous between a dynamic and stative
reading, since this distinction will usually be determined by the broader
discourse context: the child was
frightened by the noise is normally dynamic, and the child was frightened that she would lose her way is normally
stative. But as we have seen, the
capitalization process in Spanish does not stop at making overt such familiar
covert distinctions; it seems to go further than this by introducing new and
ever more subtle kinds of distinction.
These are the distinctions that can be represented in English and many
other languages only by elaborate paraphrase or, more usually in translation,
by total avoidance. The difference between
Juan es soltero and Juan está soltero (roughly, ‘Juan is a
bachelor, that is his marital status’ and ‘Juan is a bachelor, he hasn’t
married (yet)’) defies convenient parallel in English. The ser/estar
contrast is further exploited creatively by writers and humourists.[5]
The
intriguing thing about this apparently initially redundant process is therefore
that it is so extensively exploited none the less, to the point that it comes
to transcend redundancy by making itself indispensable to the language. We may return to the home computer analogy:
writing a letter on a computer is not strictly necessary in the first place,
but the computer’s ability to produce a spellcheck program, different fonts and
a logo may become essential parts of letter-writing which were hitherto
disregarded because they were practically impossible; once they become
possible, they come to form normal expectations about how letter-writing should
be done, and no one can imagine what life was like beforehand. Spanish similarly appears to have gained,
and to be gaining, in subtlety through capitalization on the ser/estar distinction.
3.2.3
Creativity
I
have suggested that capitalization is not motivated by economy, by isomorphism
or even necessarily by iconicity. We
come back, therefore, to Sapir’s notion of the ‘sheer play of its [a
language’s] means of expression’, that is, the creativity of human beings, who
experiment with linguistic form for rather the same reasons as they climb
mountains or seek explanations in historical linguistics - just because the
material is there waiting to be exploited.
This is not to say that such linguistic development is unmotivated or
disinterested; ‘new’ instances of the ser/estar
opposition no doubt owe much to ‘dynamic maxims’ (6)-(9) identified by Keller
(1994:101),[6]
as I hinted when remarking on the register-specificity of some usages. Nor is the process unconstrained: we have
seen how the fact that it involves association sets the requirement that each
successive stage of the semantic development of estar should have something in common with the preceding stage; and
how the mechanism of reanalysis of copula complement constructions requires the
availability of a double structural description for past participles. It is doubtful that the process is
teleological, even though there may be a plausibly identifiable eventual goal
in which all structural possibilities are fully realized; but, as we have seen,
there is no readily available isomorphic or iconic motivation by which
capitalization is driven. It is also
doubtful whether it is ‘preordained’ in the sense of Aitchison’s (1987:21)
‘snowball’,[7]
since a number of the Romance languages have an incipient distinction of the
Spanish kind, though they do not capitalize on it to the same extent (Pountain
1982), and it is clear that there is not necessarily anything inexorable or
catastrophic about the process.
4.
Conclusion
We
arrive at the conclusion, then, that capitalization is primarily a product of
the exploitative creativity of speakers, subject to language-internal
constraint but not obviously to language-internal motivation. I finally return to the question of génie.
Capitalization on the ser/estar
distinction has patently differentiated Spanish (and to a certain extent all
the Ibero-Romance languages) from many other Romance languages; it can even be
argued that Spanish speakers iconize reality differently from speakers of other
languages because of this feature.
Capitalization may therefore prove to be an important factor in
accounting for the phenomenon of génie,
which, shorn of its nationalistic associations but thereby firmly related to
the root causes of linguistic change, may turn out to be a more tangible
concept than has hitherto been realised.
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Vincent, N. & Harris,
M. (eds) (1982), Studies in the Romance
Verb, London: Croom Helm.
Vincent, N. (1992)
'Exaptation and abduction', Plenary paper to the Fifth International Morphology
Meeting, Krems.
Voltaire
(1879), Dictionnaire philosophique,
Oeuvres complètes, 19, Paris: Garnier.
[1]The term génie has suffered from being associated
with supposed ‘national’ characteristics; thus the eighteenth-century writer A.
de Rivarol, cited in Harmer (1979:8): ‘Dans ce rapide tableau des nations, on
voit le caractère des peuples et le génie de leur langue marcher d’un pas égal,
et l’un est toujours garant de l’autre’; this should not detract from the
usefulness of the notion.
[2]This is no
doubt an over-simplification, since the reflexive also provided a means of
expressing the passive voice in Romance; but it is clear that from a
morphological point of view the copula + PP construction is the continuation of
the Latin inflected passive (Harris 1978:187-90).
[3]This is not
entirely true of the ser + past
participle construction, however.
Although there are some past participles which appear to be available as
predicative adjectives with ser as
well as forming the ser-passive, a
number appear to be restricted in some way.
Thus agitado appears with ser as an adjective in the sentence los días siguientes fueron agitados
(‘the following days were agitated’) but as a passive in the sentence la probeta fue agitada (‘the test-tube
was shaken’): such possibilities would seem to be pragmatically
determined. But although aburrido in its sense of ‘boring’ may be
used predicatively with ser, there is
no ser-passive: los estudiantes fueron aburridos is interpretable only as ‘the
students were boring’, not ‘the students were bored’ (change of tense has no
impact on this situation).
[4]See, however,
Gili Gaya (1948:110), reported in Pountain (1993:175-6).
[5]Cf. J.A. de Zunzunegui, El hijo hecho a contrata, p.397, cit De Bruyne (forthcoming): Viejo no se es, se está (‘People are not old, they just feel old’).
[6]These are: (6)
Talk in such a way that you are noticed, (7) Talk in such a way that you are
not recognisable as a member of the group, (8) Talk in an amusing, funny, etc.
way, (9) Talk in an especially polite, flattering, charming, etc. way.
[7]Aitchison
envisages ‘a situation in which a language, having taken a particular path, is
caught in a rule conspiracy, so that (barring extraordinary circumstances) it
is bound to develop along preordained channels, as a particular type of rule
proliferates. It is, as it were, in the
position of a snowball rolling down hill which gathers more snow as it goes,
and is unable to stop its impetus’.