A First-Phase Syntax Approach to Grammaticalization: Evidence from the Spanish Pseudo-Copula Quedar(se)

The pseudo-copula quedar(se)<‘end up’ + adjective> in Spanish is used as a test field to under-stand how the pressures ensuing from the loss of non-syntactic semantic information can be the trigger for changes in a verb’s argument structure information. Using data from corpora, we explore how the grammaticalization process of the pseudo-copula unfolded to yield an aspectual copula devoid of lexical meaning. To that end, we examine the properties of the pseudo-copula in current day Spanish and put forth a First-Phase syntax approach (Ramchand 2008) to its argument structure using her notion of underassociation.