Search

This paper provides an analysis of transparent gerunds in Spanish, as in ¿Qué llegó [silbando ] Juan? 'What arrived [whistling ] Juan?', using a decomposition of Aktionsart in a series of syntactic heads. A traditional analysis of these secondary predicates as adjuncts would undermine well-established syntactic principles restricting movement and extraction. We argue that these transparent gerunds should be analyzed as syntactic constituents merged as part of the syntactic projections associated with Aktionsart. More precisely, they qualify as RhemePs - assuming Ramchand's First Phase Syntax system - thus allowing their arguments to be extracted. Well-attested differences between Spanish and English gerunds will be explained in our analysis by proposing that the Spanish gerund projects as PathP (given it carries a path preposition), whereas English gerunds are simply RhemeP (lacking any sort of preposition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the information structure of VP-anaphora constructions in English, Spanish, and German. The goal is to provide an initial account of the syntactic and prosodic licensing mechanisms of VP-anaphora and to suggest some theoretical consequences for the syntactic representation of the different types of focus and topic. Recent studies (e.g. Rooth 1992b; Tomioka 1995; Fox 1998) have proposed that the characteristic feature of VP-anaphora constructions is that they bear contrastive focus on the remaining subject. We argue against this claim by providing evidence from prosodic and syntactic investigations of the remaining elements. Our hypothesis is that presentational focus in VP-anaphora is realized on the negative/affirmative expression and that the remaining constituent is free to take various discourse Junctions depending on the context and the type of construction in which the VP-anaphora occurs. Our main empirical argument against the above claim comes from Spanish, where the remaining constituent can never be interpreted as a contrastive focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The syntactic correlates of the diachronic process of subjectification within grammatical constructions, unlike that of discourse markers and connectives, do not include a cancellation of syntax. This can make the identification of subjectification within some grammaticalization processes difficult to identify. Pairs of purportedly synonymous constructions, such as continuative aspectual markers in Spanish, offer an ideal site to explore how certain linguistic contexts, through frequency, can come to be associated with more or less subjectivity. Six forms are included in this study: the phasal adverbs aún 'still' and todavía 'still' and the 'phasal periphrastic' (Laca 2000) constructions including (semi-)auxiliaries: seguir 'follow' + V ndo and continuar 'continue' for positive polarity, and the corresponding seguir sin 'follow without' + INF and continuar sin 'continue without' + INF for negative polarity. In a variationist study of 481 occurrences of these forms from 1760-1860 in Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and 2762 occurrences from 1975-1980 from Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), it is found that the difference between these 'synonyms' is linked, on the one hand, to contextual elements indicative of subjectivity, and on the other, to register. Furthermore, it is suggested that variation due to differing levels of subjectivity and register variation may share some characteristic patterns in the distribution of grammatical features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]