Plural determiners in the expression of telicity

the aspectual clitic “se” in Spanish from Colombia and Chile

Abstract

Telicity is characterized by the presence of an endpoint of the event linguistically delimited in the sentence. One of the ways in which this delimitation can be made is through the insertion of determiners in the verbal complement. In Spanish, it is discussed whether plural determiners lead to a telic or atelic reading of the sentence. In that language, there is an aspectual particle known as the telic “se” that ratifies the telicity value of the sentence. Thus, it is used, in this research, as an instrument to verify the role that plural determiners have, when they head the verbal complement, for the delimitation of the event. In view of this, it was intended, with this work, to verify if the telic “se” could be combined with verbs that contained verbal complements headed by plural determiners in Spanish based on data from the varieties spoken in Colombia and Chile. For this purpose, a linguistic test, characterized as commented grammar judgment, was applied to native speakers of these regions. The results demonstrate that the association investigated in the study is possible in both varieties and that verbal complements headed by plural determiners lead to a telic reading of the sentence. In addition, it was possible to observe that the association of the telic “se” with verbs such as “beber” and with determiners such as “ciertos(as)” and “pocos(as)” seems infrequent in the language. It was argued that the telic “se” seems to combine more frequently with verbs that contain complements headed by plural determiners that have less contextual dependence.