Abstract

In this talk I will present work carried out with Tim Stowell on temporal and modal issues of copular clauses headed by dispositional evaluative adjectives. As discussed in Stowell 1991, Arche 2006, Martin 2011, Fabregas et al 2013, Arche & Stowell 2019, Arche et al 2021, a.o., these adjectives present straddling properties between dispositions and events. Illustrative examples are John was smart to sell his shares last year, John is cruel to scold little children. Drawing from data from Spanish, where tense and aspect are overt in the inflection of the copula, I will discuss the following facts: the adjective expresses the evaluation of a judge at the time of the attitude holder while the tense and aspect overt in the copula seem interpreted in the infinitival clause; when actuality entailments are associated to the event expressed by the infinitive, these depend on the aspectual value (perfective, imperfective) expressed in the copula; the copula choice seems mostly restricted to ser in Spanish, which we argue can be accounted for by the predication as individual-level between the infinitive and the adjective.