Los valores semánticos del neutro lo en español y su comportamiento sintáctico

The categorization of the neuter lo in Spanish is problematic due to the fact that its semantic values and its different syntactic behaviors fluctuate its grammatical status between the article and the pronoun. The main goal of this article is to looking for a more plausible explanation about the problem by investigating its possible semantic values on the one hand and on the other its syntactic behavior. There were many attempts to shed light on the semantic values of lo, among which I analyzed Bosque and Moreno (1990), Villalba (2009) and López García (2005). The tripartite distinction of the values of lo of Bosque and Moreno (1990) was generally accepted by researchers : lo individual, lo qualitative and lo quantitative. In this article, I tried to contrast these three researchers arguments about the semantic values of lo. Specially López García (2005) argues that the neuter lo in Spanish has a grammatical status as proadjective pre-article , which allows us to explain the nominaliser lo (article or pronoun) as well as the predicative lo in copulative constructions in a coherent and homogeneous way. In the last section in order to provide the learning contents about the neuter lo for Spanish learners as L2, I classified the six contexts in which appears the neuter lo and explained specific meanings in each case: lo + copulative verb, lo + AP, lo + AP/AdvP + que, lo + SP, lo + que + sentence and lo + possessive.