Spanish “todavía”: Continuity and transition

This paper presents an analysis of the meaning of Spanish todavía, traditionally considered as a durative time adverb, sometimes translatable into English as still or yet but not always. Our main point is that the semantic content of this lexical item consists of two procedural components. The first one is a basic continuative aspectual sense, while the second instructs for the contextual incorporation of an assumption about a potential transition. This approach has several virtues. First, it allows us to maintain a parsimonious analysis, which shows that there is no need to treat todavía as two distinct lexical items with different polarities each, as some have proposed (Bosque, 1980). We suggest, in contrast, that in Spanish todavía can be analysed as a single lexical item, and we account for its behaviour both in affirmative and in negative clauses. Second, we argue that the procedural component of the meaning of todavía explains its distribution patterns. It also clarifies the origin of the implicatures of various strengths about the future that may emerge when it is used. Finally, our characterisation allows us to provide an explanation of the way in which the wide range of meanings and pragmatic effects that are attached to the use of todavía (e.g. scalar readings, emphasis and concession) can be derived from the basic semantic sense we propose.