Search

In this paper, two uses of según are analyzed: the one in which this particle has a complement with interrogative value (según quién venga; según si Juan viene o no, ‘depending on who comes; depending on whether John comes or not’) and the one in which the term includes a scalar change (Los árboles van perdiendo sus hojas según avanza el otoño, ‘The trees lose their leaves as autumn progresses’). The latter construction is interpreted in a similar way to proportional comparatives; however, they are not formally equivalent. It is argued that in both uses según has the same interpretation so that the differences come from the formal and interpretive properties of its arguments. In fact, según is a dependency predicate (Bosque 2010) that expresses a logical instruction according to which the set of alternatives contained in its internal argument (be it an interrogative sequence or a scalar change) must be replicated in its external argument in order to establish a distributive relationship between the elements of each of these sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]