aktionsart in Rioplatense Spanish

Rioplatense Spanish carries the stative, dynamic, telic and atelic distinctions in the lexical meanings of its verbs, and supplies no grammatical marking that states which one a given verb has. A speaker who needs the shape of an event to be explicit chooses a different verb, adds an adverbial such as en una hora or durante una hora, or reaches for a verbal periphrasis such as empezar a plus an infinitive or dejar de plus an infinitive, and each of those changes what is said rather than marking a value on the verb already chosen. Two candidates might have qualified and neither does. The change of state suffixes, among them the -ecer of anochecer and envejecer and the pattern that derives agrandar and enrojecer from adjectives, are word formation: they build new verbs whose temporal shape is then inherent, rather than marking a value on an existing one. Aspectual se, in the contrast between comí la manzana and me comí la manzana, requires a bounded event and is therefore sensitive to telicity without expressing it. The dimension's own definition counts word formation as marking, and on that reading the change of state series would qualify; the convention adopted here treats derivation that creates a new word as falling outside the dimension, and that is recorded as a convention rather than as a settled result.