Abstract

ARTEAGA SANTOS, Sandra  and  MALDONADO SOTO, Ricardo. Ya estuvo: the limit of an action. Cuad. Lingüíst. Col. Méx. [online]. 2019, vol.6, n.1, e94.  Epub Feb 18, 2020. ISSN 2007-736X.  https://doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v6i1.94.

Among the high number of lexicalized collocations in Mexican Spanish, an important portion of them is built with the adverb ya: ya mero ‘its coming’, ya valió ‘it’s gone’, etc. This work examines the content of one of these constructions: ya estuvo.

(1) Hoy termino con Cablevisión. Ya estuvo bonito de tanto dolor. (Twitter)

(2) Concreta, manito, tú sabes, que arrastre y que agarre, uno que pegue y ya estuvo. (CREA)

(3) Ya estuvo que no superaré esta canción. (Twitter)

Based on the tenets of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987: 11-30), we show that the nuclear features of the construction ya estuvo determine the existence of a set of construction-extensions that share the notion of “boundary”. Given the nature of this construction, the study focuses exclusively on examples from Mexican Spanish. We propose that the construction ya estuvo is fully compositional since the addition of the meanings of its basic components add up to a resultative meaning. Although the construction has become an idiom, each component imposing a limit and an end point of a process can be identified; i.e., verbal telicity, extreme demarcation with adverbs of gradation, punctual demarcation by "conceptual anchor" ya (Maldonado y Delbecque 2009: 191 Delbecque y Maldonado 2011: 74) combine to depict events that are seen as fully done even when they may have not been concluded. The high level of lexicalization of ya estuvo has allowed for the construction to erase some of the closing markers, without losing the meaning of boundary. Hence the most extended form of this construction is the one which presents only the perfect verb along with the anchor ya: ya estuvo. Moreover, the presentative construction ya estuvo que + completive clause presents as relevant for the time of speech events that are about to happen. We show that the anchor ya validates the notion of “end” as relevant for the time of speech and subjectively brings it closer to the conceptualizer. The remarkable relationship between the different constructions (ya estuvo bueno ‘it’s enough’, ya estuvo que ‘X will happen for sure’, etc.) suggests that the nuclear features of the construction ya estuvo determine the constructional extensions with readings associated with concluding or stopping an event as the situation is brought to some limit or some extreme.

Keywords : telicity; anchor; syntactic metonymy; terminating constructions.

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