Martín Fuchs to give an invited talk at Utrecht University

PhD Candidate Martín Fuchs will give an invited talk this coming Monday, December 9th, at Utrecht University, as part of the Leiden Utrecht Semantics Happenings (LUSH) Series. In his talk, “The communicative underpinnings of synchronic dialectal variation: experimental studies in the Spanish Imperfective domain”, he shows that within the Spanish Imperfective domain, the Simple Present and the Present Progressive markers alternatively convey the event-in-progress and the habitual reading in a many-to-many mapping. He argues that the availability of each marker to convey each of these readings ultimately responds to communicative and cognitive pressures that are reflected in features of the contexts that affect the interpretation of these markers. This proposal is supported both by a corpus study and by experimental data from a set of tasks that allow for the controlled manipulation of contextual information. He finally shows that the observed synchronic variation responds to sub-stages within the Progressive-to-Imperfective shift, a process of semantic change well-documented cross-linguistically.