RT Journal Article T1 When "estar" is not there : A cross-linguistic analysis of individual/stage-level copular sentences in Romance A1 Bedinelli Silvagni, Federico AB This article studies how Romance languages encode the individual-level (IL)/stage-level (SL) aspectual distinction in the domain of non-verbal predication. To this end, attributive copular clauses are considered, and those languages that mark the IL/SL paradigm by means of two different copulas (“ser” and ”estar” ‘to be’, such as Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese) are compared with mono-copular languages (such as French, Italian, and Romanian). On the basis of recent developments in the study of the IL/SL contrast and Spanish copulas, I propose that SL-ness is encoded in non-verbal SL-predicates as an uninterpretable instance of a [Stage] feature and that SL-copular sentences are derived by virtue of an agreement operation between the predicate and an Asp head that carries an interpretable instance of [Stage], which is realised as “estar” in languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. The conclusion is that the inventory of aspectual elements is the same across Romance languages, which differ one from another with respect to the presence of an SL-copula (namely, “estar”). PB De Gruyter SN 2300-9969 YR 2022 FD 2022 LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/111207 UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/111207 LA eng NO Silvagni, Federico. «When “Estar” Is Not There : A Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Individual/Stage-Level Copular Sentences in Romance». Open Linguistics, vol. 8, n.º 1, 2022, pp. 108-32. www.degruyter.com, https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2022-0186. DS Docta Complutense RD 9 abr 2025