Stativity and inchoativity

States, long considered a homogeneous event class, have been shown to actually decompose into sufficiently distinct aspectual types. Davidsonian and Kimian statives (Maienborn 2008Maienborn, Claudia. 2008. “On Davidsonian and K states.” In Existence: Semantics and Syntax, ed. by Ileana Comorovski, and Klaus von Heusinger, 107–130. Dordrecht: Springer. ; Rothmayr 2009Rothmayr Antonia. 2009. The structure of stative verbs. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ), for instance, show a major contrast in presence/absence of event-related properties, including finer-grained (sub)class distinctions. Within the Davidsonian (mixed eventive-stative) type, a novel class has been identified using Spanish data as reference (Marín and McNally 2011Marín, Rafael, and Louise McNally. 2011. “Inchoativity, change of state, and telicity: Evidence from Spanish reflexive psychological verbs.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29 (2): 467–502. ). This class, dubbed inchoative stative is characterized by including a left boundary (Piñón 1997Piñón, Christopher. 1997. “Achievements in an event semantics.” In Proceedings of SALT 7, ed. by Aaron Lawson and Eun Cho, 273–296. Ithaca: CLC Publications. ) marking the temporal onset of the state. We focus on documented Old Spanish data to argue that non-eventive (Kimian-like) left-bounded states are also possible. We note that productive combinations of the locative copula estar ‘be_-loc’ with past participles of specific verbs produce distinct selectional and interpretive patterns defined by (i) pure states (homogenous spatial situation); (ii) no change-of-state/location denotation; (iii) left boundary. If correct, data suggest that inchoative stativity is not necessarily a Davidsonian type of predication; and that two distinct types of inchoative statives should be carefully differentiated under (more) specific criteria.