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In Portuguese, mas 'but' occurs in two different structural constructions, one mainly involving contrast between two non-sentential phrases, Contraste Sintagmático 'Phrasal Contrast', and the other contrasting two sentences and presenting ellipsis, TP ellipsis with polarity items. In languages as Spanish and German, contrastive coordination typically correlates two different conjunctions with two constructions exhibiting distinct values, the corrective and the counter-expectation value. Relying on work of the past two decades on adversative coordination with corrective and counter-expectation values, the current paper aims at determining to what extend it is possible to establish a univocal correlation between the values of the adversative coordination and the constructions of Contraste Sintagmático and TP ellipsis in portuguese. It is also our goal to develop a more accurate analysis of these constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will pay attention to the behavior of adjectives such as altísimo and torpe, called ambivalent (Luján 1981) or underspecified (Fernández Leborans 1995), due to the fact that they can be combined with both the copulative verb ser and the copulative verb estar in languages such as Spanish. More specifically, I am interested in two structures, both of them dependent on the Spanish verb of perception ver. In the first, altísimo and torpe combine with the copula estar in infinitive clauses. In the second, subordinate infinitive clauses are headed by the copula ser. I will try to elucidate which is the contribution of the copulative verbs to the interpretation of these structures. With Escandell-Vidal (2018), I assume that the adjectives altísimo and torpe in combination with estar give rise to an evidential effect: the spatio-temporal situation to which the property they denote is anchored is conceived as a situation of visual experience. In the first of the structures I am interested in, the source of information is likewise encoded in the verb of perception. Therefore, the research question that will guide this study is whether the evidential content is actually being expressed twice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In previous studies, the importance of the work edited by Nicolau Peixoto -- Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos Portuguezes (Oporto 1848) -- as the first grammar of Spanish published in Portugal has already been stressed. This paper aims to go further in Peixoto's work, focusing on the contrastive notes regarding the target language and the mother tongue of it's audience, so as to frame those comments in the previous tradition of Portuguese-Spanish contrastive studies, among which the works of Howell (1662), Bluteau (1721) and Moura (1821) stand out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at fulfilling a twofold objective: to highlight the functional differences between Portuguese ou seja and Spanish o sea and to do so by making use of a model of discourse segmentation, namely, the one developed in Briz and GrupoVal.Es.Co. (2003). The results have shown that OSS share most of their functions and differ in the wider range of functions of o sea, which has modal functions that are not shared by ou seja. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States and null transition processes are the two types of events that are excluded from the infinitive clauses embedded to the Spanish verb ver, 'to see'. The reason is that none of them provide changes of properties or locations that can be perceived. This is the lexical requirement that the visual perception verb imposes to its complements. In this paper, they are examined the conditions under which certain null transition processes can appear in non-epistemic or direct perception contexts: (a) the existence of external boundaries; (b) the inexistence of presupposed states related to the asserted states; and (c) the possibility that null transition (macro)processes are analyzed in terms of non-null transition (micro)processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study one type of Spanish que (the equivalent to the complementizer "that") that can be shown to belong into the crosslinguistically restricted list of evidentials. In particular, we will claim that it encodes the (most basic) marks of non- first-hand or indirect (reported) evidence. Our point of departure is certain (apparently) independent clauses of Spanish headed by an overt complementizer (que). Some tests will be presented that support the idea that that one type of que introducing a well specified subset of root sentences shares most of the properties that have been claimed to characterize reportative evidentials in languages such as Quechua (Faller 2002, 2006). As for the properties of reportative que, it will be further shown that it does not encode any features related to epistemic modality (reliability or (im)probability) and we will propose that it is better analyzed as an illocutionary operator, affecting the illocutionary force (in line with Faller 2002 among others) and not as an epistemic modal (Izvorsky 1997 among others). In order to determine the nature of this reportative element and its origin, we contrast it with an old Spanish form, dizque, which exists nowadays in certain modern American varieties. This particle also has the properties of an evidential but behaves as an epistemic modal. In the last sections, we will propose that both evidential particles (que and dizque) are the result of a process of grammaticalization (i.e. 'upward reanalysis', or categorial change, of functional material, in the sense of Roberts and Roussou 2003) of the complex structure headed by a communication verb, dicen que "they say that". We will tentatively describe such process and introduce a hypothesis as to the nature and role of the parameter involved in the claimed reanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the properties of a previously unnoticed passive construction found in some varieties of present day Spanish. Such construction, which we refer to as double passive (following NGRALE 2009), contains two adjacent passive complexes (Ese producto fue empezado a ser usado como conservante, Eng. That product was started to being used as a preservative), but only one of them is interpretable as a bona fide passive. We discuss the properties of this structure, suggesting that the passive (i.e., participial) morphology of the aspectual predicate (i.e., fue empezado) is uninterpretable, and obtained through a mechanism of agreement at a distance (Chomsky's 2000, 2001 Agree). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]