The prospective in Spanish: Forms, semantics, pragmatics (part 1)

Abstract

Based on corpus data, the article discusses three Spanish infinitive constructions with a prospective meaning: two constructions with the verb of location estar and one with the verb of movement ir: <estar a punto de + Inf.>, <estar por + Inf.> and <ir a + Inf.>. A new approach is applied that views these constructions as a means of expressing the grammeme of the prospective in Spanish. The first part of the article contains an overview of the results of a corpus study of all three constructions which aims to clarify both diachronic and synchronic issues of the simultaneous functioning of three different means of expressing prospective semantics, their frequency, as well as the distribution of each construction in the Spanishspeaking area. The first part also offers a detailed comparative analysis of the semantics of two infinitive constructions with estar. It begins with the establishment of a characteristic restriction for both constructions on filling the infinitive slot with atelic lexemes (which makes them different from the construction with the motion verb) and ends with proposed interpretations of the semantics of both constructions with the verb of location. In the second part of the work, based on a review of descriptive grammars, theories, and corpus research, the prospective construction with the verb of movement ir is discussed, and (based on the results of a corpus study of all three constructions) a description of the prospective zone in Spanish is proposed from the position of general, i. e., typologically oriented, morphology and grammatical semantics.