El verbo estar y la interpretación de los adjetivos cuantitativamente subsectivos:

Abstract

Interpreting the quantitative value of adjectives related to properties that can occur to a greater or lesser degree (quantitative subsective adjectives) implies, in principle, two inferential processes: 1) to determine the category that the entity of which the property is predicated must be related to (that is, to establish what the comparison class is), and 2) to identify the prototype of that class, which would then act as a referent. Thus, in a sentence such as El niño es alto (The boy is tall), it is necessary to infer the class of things in relation to which the boy at issue is said to be tall (other children? people in general?) and use the prototype of the appropriate category as a reference to establish which entities belong to the subgroups of tall, medium height or short. In Spanish, however, when quantitative subsective adjectives are linked to the verb estar (estar alto, estar guapo…), the properties of the comparison class and the properties of the referent have very special characteristics. In this article, we will describe how the verb estar evokes, following the idea of relevance, a comparison class made up of the different manifestations over time of the entity to which the property is attributed, and how this causes a process of identifying the prototype to be replaced by the selection of other 'central' elements that enable the subdivision of that class.