Simple and clear grammatical explanations

A response to Martha Jurado-Salinas´s article

Abstract

This paper comments on Martha Jurado-Salinas´s article on this volume. We totally agree with the first part of the article, where Jurado-Salinas describes the grammatical properties of auxiliaries ser, estar and haber and proves that a single unified explanation of every usage of ser and estar does not exist. We object, however, the didactic model she proposes based on the visual metaphors of cognitive grammar. We propose a concept of grammatical competence which does not treat formal or meaning properties in isolation, but relates formal properties with referential meaning, thus positing the limits to grammatical explanations in referential meaning due to formal properties. We exemplify our proposal with the explanation of ser/estar with adjectives