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The paper investigates recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer) constructions in Spanish and provides a number of arguments in favor of analyzing secondary que as the head of TopicP in the left periphery. The paper further examines left-dislocated phrases occurring between overt complementizers and lays out the proposal that sandwiched dislocates are not moved into but merged in the specifier of TopicP, which is headed by secondary que (or its null counterpart). Likewise, it is shown that extraction across double-que constructions is prevented by locality of movement (i.e. any movement operation across secondary que is illicit). The paper argues that the locality effects induced by movement across secondary que are reminiscent of the notorious English Comp-t phenomenon. Drawing on the Rescue-by-PF-Deletion analysis of the ameliorating effect of ellipsis on island violations, the paper provides an account of the contrast between ungrammatical sentences displaying extraction across secondary que and their grammatical counterparts without it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a compositional interpretation of Spanish simple conditional morphology (cantaría 'would sing') in independent sentences set within the semantic situations framework. It proposes that Spanish simple conditional morphology is composed of (a) a past component that encodes a topic situation, (b) a universal future operator with either an epistemic flavor or a temporal (i.e. historical) flavor/accessibility, and (c) a universal imperfective operator with a variety of flavors. Based on the interactions of these three components, the paper develops derivations for (1) past-oriented inferential readings that distinguish Spanish from French and Italian, (2) future-oriented conditionals involving past plans, which are apparently shared with French and Italian, and (3) future-in-the-past conditionals, where Spanish appears to resemble French and differs from Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the means of expressing positive epistemic judgement in Spanish and Italian: modals in their epistemic interpretation, epistemic adverb + indicative/subjunctive, with particular attention to the verbs creer/credere and their possible combination with the subjunctive. The constructions are analysed through the prism of cognitive grammar, specifically Langacker's theory of grounding. It is argued that the different types of epistemic judgement are analogous to nominal grounding elements (demonstrative pronouns, the definite article and relative quantifiers). The subjunctive after epistemic adverbs and verbs (such as tal vez or credere) is seen as the verbal counterpart of the relative quantifier some. Analyses suggest that this analogy helps to define the semantic difference between similar structures with the indicative and to resolve questions concerning the function of the subjunctive in epistemic contexts, such as the degree of uncertainty or the speaker's attitude towards the propositional content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the L2 acquisition of Spanish object drop by advanced learners whose L1s are English and Brazilian Portuguese, in order to assess effects on their knowledge of the interpretable and uninterpretable features conditioning the realization of object drop in their L2 Spanish. Object drop in Spanish is subject to semantic restrictions related to definiteness and specificity, as well as syntactic restrictions related to subjacency. Current debates about second language acquisition (SLA) have led to different hypotheses. On the one hand, the Interpretability Hypothesis/IH (Hawkins, Roger & Hajime Hattori. 2006. Interpretation of English multiple wh-questions by Japanese speakers: A missing uninterpretable feature account. Second Language Research 22. 269–301) claims that uninterpretable features will not be completely acquired. On the other hand, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis/FRH (Hwang, Sun Hee & Donna Lardiere. 2013. Plural-marking in L2 Korean: A feature-based approach. Second Language Research 29. 57–86; Lardiere, Donna. 2009. Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 25. 173–227) does not distinguish between interpretable and uninterpretable features for the purposes of SLA, arguing that the difficulty of the acquisition task hinges on the required amount of feature reassembly from the L1 to the L2 lexicon. Finally, the Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA) (Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 1996. L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research 12. 40–72; Schwartz, Bonnie & Rex Sprouse. 2000. When syntactic theories evolve: Consequences for L2 acquisition research. In John Archibald (ed.), Second language acquisition and linguistic theory, 156–186. Malden, MA: Blackwell; White, Lydia. 2003. Second language acquisition and universal grammar. New York: Cambridge University Press) hypothesis treats SLA as equivalent to first-language acquisition, in terms of the potential for ultimate attainment. Both the FT/FA and the FRH are in principle compatible with full attainment in L2 acquisition. To assess these hypotheses, this study tests the L2 acquisition of the semantic and syntactic restrictions on Spanish object drop by learners whose L1 either lacks widespread object drop (English), or has regular object drop but realizes it differently from Spanish (Brazilian Portuguese). The Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis seems to best explain the results of the two experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. Some, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. The present paper contributes to this debate by experimentally testing the realization of presentational focus in Mexican Spanish using an acceptability judgment task. The results of the experiment reveal that, for these speakers, focused constituents need not be rightmost and can in fact be stressed in non-final position, contra the consensus view. These findings expand the database on focus in Spanish and indicate that theories of the prosody/syntax interface may need to be revised, especially those theories that motivate discourse-related syntactic movement based on the requirements of the prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is abundant research that deals with diathesis alternations, such as the locative alternation (LA), because they can give us information about the interface between syntax and the lexicon. However, the literature dealing with the LA has frequently ignored the relation that exists between the crosslinguistically reduced set of prepositions that can occur in such construction. This paper postulates that the prepositions involved in the LA have either a locative or a possessive meaning, providing evidence from the comparison of Spanish and English, inter alia. These prepositions share a common underlying structure and are related by means of a simple derivation, following Freeze's (Language 68: 553-595, 1992) account of locative and possessive predication. This prepositional phrase will occupy the lower XP position in a construction with unaccusative properties D [V [XP]]], as developed in Zubizarreta & Oh (On the syntactic composition of manner and motion, linguistic inquiry monograph, MIT Press, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of ditransitivity is explored at the lexical, syntactic and surface levels. By focusing on several types of ditransitive sentences in Spanish it is revealed that there is a triple dissociation between these levels. First, it is shown that the availability of a ditransitive structure (syntactic level) for a certain verb does not depend on the verb being ditransitive (lexical level). Second, causative structures with dative arguments are shown to be ditransitive at the surface level, but not to have an underlying ditransitive structure. Finally, cases of unaccusative sentences with dative arguments are analysed as instances of ditransitive structures without lexical or surface ditransitivity. The paper argues that ditransitivity is at best a pre-theoretical, descriptive notion, and that ditransitive verbs in fact belong to Levin's (Papers from The Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 35: 223-247, 1999) non-core transitives: ditransitives are just transitives compatible with taking a relation between two individuals as complement. This analysis accounts for the intralinguistic and crosslinguistic variation in the expression of the relation, both in terms of type (two DPs related by a transitive preposition or an applicative head) and number of objects realized or omitted. Although the idea that there is no syntactic ditransitivity - that is, that no single verbal head can take two complements - has been implicit in most generative work of the last two decades, it has not been directly explored. This investigation leads to the conclusion that a syntactic property, binary branching, is at the basis of the impossibility of syntactic and lexical ditransitivity. Thus, this result suggests that syntax restricts not only possible structures but possible lexical meanings as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis for the use of the clitic se in transitive constructions, as in Juan se leyó un libro 'John se read a book'. It argues that se is an underspecified eventive verbal head which takes a bounded path as a complement. In the transitive construction, se first merges with a verb that provides the manner description for the event that se introduces. The direct object then serves as the path complement. This analysis of se is then extended to anticausative and inchoative uses of se, as in La comida se enfrió 'the food cooled down' and Juan se durmió 'John fell asleep'. Here, se does not merge with a verb but merges directly with an acategorial Root, and the Root provides the path complement. This study further supports the notion that scalar structure is important to understanding the relationship between argument structure, event structure, and syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the present paper is to identify some of the differences in the intonation of Catalan and Spanish as spoken in Majorca. The tonal features we investigated were: (1) utterance-final pitch accents in broad focus declaratives, and (2) local contrastive focus pitch accents. Previous research, mostly on related varieties, such as Central Catalan and Castilian Spanish, had indirectly suggested that potential differences could arise with regards to these specific configurations (Estebas, Phonetic and phonological properties of the final pitch accent in Catalan declaratives: 35–40, Université de Nantes, 2003a, Estebas, Atlantis Journal 25: 39–53, 2003c; Face, Intonational marking of contrastive focus in Madrid Spanish, Lincom Europa, 2002a, Face, Southwest Journal of Linguistics 23: 65–79, 2004). The Majorcan dialects of Catalan and Spanish were found to fundamentally differ in the shape and alignment patterns of their utterance-final pitch accents (of broad focus declaratives) in that Catalan displayed low or falling pitch accents while Spanish presented small rising-falling pitch accents. On the other hand, statistical differences were found with respect to the alignment of pitch valleys culminating rising-falling pitch contours in contrastive focus accents. Overall, the findings reported here add to our knowledge of the intonational differences and similarities between Romance languages by comparing two contact languages using similar materials and under identical experimental conditions. These findings are relevant for comparative-historical purposes and future language contact studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I show that a constraint-based approach to DOM, such as the OT system proposed by Aissen (2003), leads to the conclusion that the child will entertain a number of grammars different from the target grammar, before acquiring the final ranking of constraints, even under the learnability assumptions of the OT framework (such as those made by Tesar and Smolensky (1998, 2000). The data examined here, from Spanish-speaking children in the CHILDES database, clearly shows that children master Spanish DOM with a performance virtually errorless. This raises doubts regarding the capacity of the OT framework to explain a key aspect of human language, namely, the process of acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judeo-Spanish denotes those varieties of Spanish preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and have emigrated throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. This paper analyzes several types of sonorant consonant metathesis in Judeo-Spanish within the framework of Optimality Theory. Following Holt's (2004) account of Old Spanish, local metathesis of dl, dn, and nr clusters is analyzed as a repair strategy for bad syllable contact. A novel analysis is proposed in which nasal place assimilation and positional faithfulness constraints account for the failure of dm metathesis in morphologically derived environments. Judeo-Spanish also has two types of innovative rhotic metathesis that cannot be explained in terms of syllable contact. The rd > dr shift is analyzed as an effect of the Obligatory Contour Principle, whereby adjacent segments identical in place, manner, and voicing specifications are prohibited. The second type involves the displacement of r toward the left edge of a word, also frequently attested in popular Modern Spanish. A comprehensive account of rhotic metathesis is developed, following recent work on position-specific constraint evaluation (Riggle and Wilson 2005) and segmental adjacency constraints (Carpenter 2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified account of the behavior of wh-in-situ questions in Spanish (i.e., non-neutral word order and the Sentence Final Requirement). The analysis presented argues that phonological properties govern the distribution of in-situ wh-phrases. More precisely, in-situ whphrases in Spanish need to appear last within their intonational phrase. Following insights from Stjepanovi (1999, 2003) on the interaction between stress assignment (Zubizarreta 1998) and the Copy Theory of movement (Chomsky 1993), I argue that in-situ wh-phrases need to appear in final position to receive main stress via the Nuclear Stress Rule. I show that in-situ wh-phrases are spell-outs of lower copies. This analysis captures the behavior of all in-situ wh-phrases in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Spanish ni siquiera is like other n words in that it is ambiguous: it can have a genuinely negative interpretation and one where it is not by itself negative but requires a negative context to be licensed as a NPI. The ambiguity of ni siquiera is reduced w an ambiguity of ni, which is shown to also appear in other contexts, namely when ni combines with a minimizer and when it functions as a conjunction. The semantics of ni siquiera is argued to be relevant to the debate of whether English even is ambiguous. It also bears on a recent proposal whereby NPIs are limited to downward entailing contexts because they contain a tacit 'even'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes some of the more salient intonational phenomena of Spanish, and reviews several of the most pressing questions that remain to be addressed before a definitive model of the system can be incorporated into a consensus transcription system for the language. The phenomena reviewed include the metrical underpinnings of the tune, and some of the local tone shapes that are anchored at stressed syllables or at phrase edges in several common intonation contours. The description of known facts is couched in the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology, as is the review of outstanding questions. The description is used to motivate the preliminary transcription conventions proposed by the Spanish ToBI development group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence from Spanish and Italian for the distinction between deep and surface anaphora as first proposed by Hankamer and Sag's (1976). We observe that certain verbs in Spanish and Italian allow their infinitival/clausal complements to be null. However, sentences containing them become ungrammatical when we try to extract an element that would have appeared inside the clausal complement in the non-null version, such as a clitic, a wh-phrase, etc ... or when restructuring has occurred. We propose, and provide evidence that these null clausal complements in Spanish and Italian are instances of Null Complement Anaphora, a type of deep anaphor in Hankamer and Sag's (1976) sense and not an instance of surface anaphor such as VP ellipsis in English. We claim that Null Complement Anaphors and deep anaphors in general are elements' that do not have internal structure in the syntax, and therefore cannot host a trace. They contrast with surface anaphors which do have internal structure in the syntax and can host a trace, allowing for extraction out of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that unspecified objects in sentences such as Maria leyo anoche (= Maria read (something) last night) should be represented as null incorporated nouns in l-syntax (Hale & Keyser 1993, 2002). Specifically, the material understood as 'something' is a null bare N that incorporates into the verb 'read,' forming an endocentric compound meaning 'THING-read.' While the general idea underlying such a hypothesis is not new (Mateu 2012; Marti 2011; Zubizarreta & Oh 2007), the analysis outlined here provides the first explicit formalization of it in such a way that can account for a wide range of properties (some not yet described in the literature) that are intimately related to what can be broadly defined as 'noun incorporation constructions' cross-linguistically. Like certain types of noun incorporation constructions in other languages, unspecified object constructions have the following properties: (i) they are restricted lexically (in this case to 'activity'/'manner' verbs), (ii) the verb+unspecified object may have a conventionalized interpretation, (iii) unspecified objects are indefinite and take obligatory narrow scope with respect to all other operators, (iv) unspecified objects may be modified 'externally' by a limited set of adjectives (v) the verb+unspecified object gives rise to an atelic reading. All of these properties are shown to derive from the fact that unspecified objects are null incorporated nouns. This is desirable since the same set of properties are shared by different types of noun incorporation constructions in languages outside Romance and, to a large extent, by bare noun constructions in Spanish and other Romance languages (Espinal & McNally 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an empirical study on the prosody of clitic left-dislocations (CLLDs) in Spanish and offers new perspectives on how the phenomenon of inter-speaker variation in linguistic data can be integrated into formal grammatical theory. Results from a production experiment based on scripted speech show that CLLDs have an obligatory left and right boundary (typically a high edge tone at the intermediate phrase level), while other sentence-internal boundaries are subject to inter-speaker variation. The hypothesis presented here suggests that prosodic boundaries which mark information structural (IS) categories are more necessary than boundaries which satisfy alignment constraints; only the latter can show inter-speaker variation ( IS-over-Alignment Hypothesis). A modified version of the Stochastic Optimality Theory (SOT) is proposed to account for the attested inter-speaker variation. By assuming that the degree of constraint overlap can vary between individual speakers while the underlying hierarchy remains invariant, the modified version of SOT is applicable beyond variation in the output structure of a whole population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the phonetics and phonology of initial peaks and final falls in wh-questions produced by speakers of the variety of Spanish spoken in the Castile-La Mancha (Manchego) region of Spain. The acoustic analysis is based on speech data for nine speakers, and the goal is to identify how utterance-initial and utterance-final F 0 gestures relate to broader issues in intonational phonology and the prosodic signaling of wh-questions. The findings for left periphery constituents provide evidence for a H tone at the utterance boundary for all speakers, although the exact autosegmental representation cannot be provided due to variability in peak alignment patterns. The findings for right periphery constituents indicate two distinct speaker groups based on nuclear syllable and posttonic gestures. Specifically, the continuum of final falls is motivated by contrasting bitonal nuclear pitch accent configurations: H + L* vs. ¡L + H*. The boundary L% specification is argued for all speakers in spite of seemingly divergent posttonic gestures. The experimental findings speak to cross-linguistic issues such as prominence marking in wh-question intonation, the syntax-prosody interface in wh-questions, and the internal structure of pitch accent configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides with a descriptive overview of the main productive patterns in present-day Spanish compounding, their structural and semantic characteristics. In this paper we try to maintain a theory-neutral point of view, although some theoretical stances are mandatory in order to accomplish the descriptive aims. Following previous work (for example Rainer and Varela 1992), a great number of minor processes and the so-called 'syntagmatic compounds' are excluded from the discussion. The plan is to show that Spanish compounds form a relatively simple and harmonic scheme: it is a predominantly endocentric system that produces new Nouns and Adjectives, which can be left- or right-headed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the topic of retention in structural and semantic change. While much of the literature on grammaticalization has focused on uncovering the remnants of semantic nuances of lexical items contained in autonomous structures, recent proposals have argued for a parallel effect related to structural conditions. To address this issue, I survey the distribution of hacer 'to do/make'; + time constructions in Spanish used with either a punctual or durative meaning. Using a quantitative analysis of corpus data from spoken Spanish, I argue that hacer + time exhibits both (i) a general leveling across the constructional paradigm resulting in structural and semantic neutralization and (ii) retention of clausal features associated with the source construction, particularly with low-frequency collocates (e.g., hacía). The result of this process of grammaticalization is a type of syntactic 'blend' that expresses features both of a verb and an adjunctival element. The nature of this particular instance of structural and semantic change is argued to be distinct from cases discussed previously in the literature in that the hacer + time construction does not exhibit the same degree of structural autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centers on the nature of Spanish TP-ellipsis (e.g., Juan fue al cine y María también, lit. ‘Juan went to the cinema and Mary also’), paying special attention to its behavior in contexts of long extraction of the remnant of the elliptical site. The long extraction data provide further evidence that TP-ellipsis in Spanish behaves as Clitic Left Dislocation. In particular, TP-ellipsis is sensitive to adjunct and relative islands. These facts lead us to the question of why other cases of TP-ellipsis, namely, sluicing, can indeed repair islands. I show that an approach such as the one in Merchant (Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 661–738, 2004, Variable island repair under ellipsis, Cambridge University Press, 2008) is not able to derive this pattern and propose an alternative solution. Assuming that ellipsis and copy deletion form a natural class (Chomsky, A minimalist program for linguistic theory, MIT Press, 1993, Chomsky, The minimalist program, MIT Press, 1995), I argue that the presence or absence of island repair effects is derived as a matter of identity. Basically, a phrasal copy is elided under the same mechanism that applies in normal cases of ellipsis. A copy that is elided in a given syntactic cycle is not computed for the identity condition on ellipsis in a later cycle. By contrast, if a copy cannot be elided in a syntactic cycle, it has to be computed for identity reasons at the ellipsis cycle. Under the assumption that indefinites and traces of wh-phrases are identical for the purposes of identity, it follows that ellipsis under wh-sluicing can feed elision of the wh-copies in the elliptical gap when there is an explicit indefinite in the correlate. This is never the case with Spanish TP-ellipsis because the copies of a left dislocated remnant never have an identical correlate in the antecedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the semantic features of the so-called “neuter” in the demonstrative system of Modern Spanish and presents a diachronic analysis of the semantic as well as morphophonological changes which have taken place from Latin to Spanish. We show that the semantic features commonly assumed as being associated with gender (or classification), and more particularly, with the “neuter”, (e.g., [(in)animate]), are not able to capture the semantic difference between “neuter” and feminine / masculine, neither in Latin nor in Spanish. For Latin, we argue that the relevant difference for this classification is based on the fact that the neuter is underspecified for a feature [discrete] (vs. presence of the feature [discrete] for masculine / feminine) and elaborate a feature geometry for demonstratives which captures this fact. As the opposition between [discrete] and [non-discrete] is strictly speaking not a matter of classification, i.e., one of gender, but a specification of the operation of individuation, this leads ultimately to the reduction of the Latin classification-node in the geometry and to the Modern Spanish feature geometry. There, the absence of [individuation] results in what mistakenly is called “neuter”, i.e., in expressions whose referent does not have to be individuated (vs. feminine/masculine, with a specified feature [individuation]). We present a detailed morphophonological analysis of the Latin pronominal morphology, which is based on a realizational approach and which uses case feature decomposition and the morphological schemes proposed by Wiese (Zur lateinischen Nominalflexion: Die Form-Funktions-Beziehung, IDS Mannheim, 2003). This analysis leads us to the conclusion that there are no specific morphological schemes for the neuter in the Latin demonstratives (Vd, i.e., /ud/, being the mere default in our analysis). The most intriguing fact here is the absence of genuine neuter endings in the plural, both in Latin and in Modern Spanish. We do not consider this a mere coincidence, but as a hint at the fundamental semantic change mentioned above, the feature [individuation] being superordinate to [group] (for plural). Finally, we describe the important morphological change in the pronominal system from Latin to Spanish, i.e., the reduction from a five-case-system to a two case-system, in detail and argue, based on the notions of underspecification and default, that Spanish /o/ just preserves the default status of Latin /ud/, being thus no “neuter” gender marker at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to show that the structure of CP in Spanish is more complex than it appears to be in most descriptive approaches. In particular, we analyze five types of constructions, which are quite extended in all dialects of Spanish but which have remained almost unaddressed in grammatical studies. These data clearly reveal a complex structure for Spanish CP both in root and embedded clauses: They involve sentences with more than one instance of a complementizer heading the clause, sentences where a wh-element (interrogative or exclamative) can be preceded or followed by the complementizer que ‘that’, and matrix sentences (obligatorily) introduced by an explicit Comp, among other cases. Our point of departure will be the studies on the so called “sentence left periphery” (Rizzi, The fine structure of left periphery, Kluwer, 1997) containing an upper limit, ForceP and a lower limit, FinP. Our claim will be that in Spanish there are two instances of que: que1 and que2 which are respectively generated in the upper and in the lower part of the sentence periphery. In addition, we will provide data suggesting that there might even be a third instance of que, a kind of “reinforcement” of Force. In this sense Spanish resembles some languages which are very different from the typological point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages that display Differential Object Marking (DOM) and Clitic Doubling (CD), like Spanish and Romanian, show specificity restrictions in both grammatical environments. This paper is devoted to the problem of explaining why specificity effects are present in those constructions. I intend to give an answer to two interrelated questions: (i) What kind of connection holds between the two kinds of object marking?; (ii) How do specificity effects arise in both cases? An answer to question (i) involves a reexamination of the fundamental intuition behind so-called ‘Kayne's generalization’, i.e., the assumption that CD requires the object to be case-marked. I claim that the systematic co-occurrence of CD and DOM in certain languages is simply an effect of their semantic contribution to the proposition expressed. As for question (ii), my claim is that there is no unified account of specificity restrictions. In CD, they originate in the [+definite] feature of the clitic and the interpretive requirements it imposes on the associate DP (Gutiérrez-Rexach 2001): when the associate is an indefinite DP, the only way it can obey the matching condition established by the definite clitic in the doubling configuration is being assigned a specific (partitive or discourse-linked) reading. DOM, on the contrary, is not associated with specificity by means of definiteness and discourse-dependence. The basic property that triggers specificity constraints in DOM contexts, whatever it may be, does not give rise to the same presuppositionality effects and anaphoric readings that CD forces. Thus, specificity effects derive from different semantic features in the two constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past two decades have seen many attempts to provide an explanation for the intriguing fact that Spanish – a language whose infinitives are traditionally believed to be [–TNS]/[–AGR] – has specified subjects in infinitivals in several context types and with specific dialect-sensitive positional restrictions (preverbal vs. postverbal position of the DP). The first part of the present paper is a critical reevaluation of the proposals made so far in the literature. We show that none of them is powerful enough to account for the ill-formedness of infinitivals containing certain instances of nominative arb se. In the second part of the article we claim that these infinitivals have abstract agreement which is not fully grammaticalized: infinitival clauses – irrespective of their structural position (subject or adjunct) – need a trigger that induces a reanalysis of PRO (the standard subject in these infinitivals) as pro (or PROarb) and the subsequent checking of nominative Case of the overt postverbal DP. In addition, Aux-to-Comp seems to be a possible Case provider in some clauses. Concerning preverbal subjects in Caribbean Spanish, their legitimacy could be explained by analogy with finite clauses, if we admit that this dialect has developed some kind of personal infinitive. For other varieties it could tentatively be argued that the well-formedness of these structures is a result of reduced normative pressure, with the effects of syntactic independence playing a role in some clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a constraint-based analysis of a process that in Traditional New Mexico Spanish (TNMS) generates a syllabic consonant from a sonorant consonant + stressed high vowel combination. It is argued that although vowels are more suitable than consonants to function as prosodic heads, consonants may sometimes be favored over vowels in the role of foot and syllable head. This situation arises when a positional markedness constraint barring the marked value on the place-of-articulation scale (e.g., Dorsal) from the position of foot DTE becomes active. Contrary to previous approaches that assume that vowel deletion is a condition for the syllabization of the consonant, it is argued that the vowel that disappears in the process of syllabizing a consonant is not deleted but either absorbed by that consonant or assimilated to it. It is also demonstrated that syllabic consonants are subject to two universal alignment constraints that govern their distribution by forcing them to be coarticulated with another consonant. Although languages may vary as to whether the syllabic consonant is coarticulated with a preceding or with a following consonant, there are no languages where syllabic consonants appear between two vowels or between a vowel and a pause precisely because in such environments there is not an adjacent consonant available for coarticulation. The condition that the syllabic consonants of TNMS be coarticulated not with a preceding, but with a following consonant, is the reason why they do not occur in prevocalic or prepausal position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a broad empirical description and a close examination of how Catalan speakers sillabify sequences of vocoids of rising sonority within the lexicon (e.g., piano 'piano', clariana 'clearing' or ávia 'grandmother'). A survey with 381 words administered to 60 speakers has enabled us to identify two distinct varieties of Central Catalan: a more innovative variety (which displays a stronger tendency to glide formation) and a more conservative variety. This situation, together with a certain degree of inter-speaker variation found in the data, reveals the existence of language change in progress. Both varieties display clear prosodic regularities: word-initial positional effects (that is, gliding tends to be blocked in word-initial position; cf. m[i, c] l 'mewl', p [i,a]no 'piano', d [ie] dema 'diadem') and distance-to-stress effects (that is, gliding increases when the distance to the tonic syllable is greater; cf. d [ie] lecte 'dialect' vs. d[je] lectologia 'dialectology'). These prosodic effects are also strikingly similar to the ones found in Spanish (cf. Hualde 1999). The article shows that this gliding process can be accounted for in a very intuitive way in terms of a correspondence-based OT analysis which captures the prosodic and analogical forces governing this process together with the dialectal and inter-speaker variation found in the data. In OT terms, the difference between the innovative and the conservative varieties will be interpreted as the loss (or weakening) of a prosodic constraint in the innovative variety. Idiolectal variation will be interpreted as the set of analogical/correspondence relationships each speaker establishes with other words in the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) and Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995), this paper presents an analysis of the patterns exhibited by Spanish portmanteaus (e.g., [bruxéres] 'mean women" < [brúxa] 'witch' + [muxéres] 'women'), which demonstrates that such playful word creations are not generated according to the same principles that govern the grammatical morphology. Instead, portmanteaus are created in the extragrammatical morphology (Dressler 2000), where they are subject to constraints that are 'distorted' versions of those found in natural language, and others that are exclusive to playful language. It is also shown that Spanish portmanteaus are endowed with a syntactic/semantic head, which is crucial in order to account not only for their syntactic and semantic properties but also for their phonological form. Despite their non-canonical structure, portmanteaus are subject to well-formedness and faithfulness constraints, which determine that only one of the many possible ways in which the source words may combine is optimal. Yet above well-formedness and faithfulness constraints, there is a principle of recoverability of the source words, which portmanteaus must always respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phonetic implementation of word-internal s-aspiration in Eastern Andalusian Spanish, focusing on the relationships between three phonetic reflexes of s-aspiration: vowel lengthening, consonant lengthening, and vowel aspiration. The results of the study reveal a heretofore unreported, tightly constrained relation between vowel and consonant lengthening. Specifically, as the ratio of consonant lengthening in the s-aspirated versus nonaspirated contexts grows, the degree of vowel lengthening decreases. In addition, I argue that the data call attention to the limitations of traditional phonological representations. Focusing on the relationship between consonant and vowel lengthening, I show that traditional moraic structure does not adequately characterize this relationship. By contrast, I argue that a gestural model affords a more explicit, though still abstract, characterization of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of studies on Spanish focus have dealt with the way word order is used to convey focus. Recent studies have shown that prosody is also used in marking Spanish focus, though the role of intonation has not been extensively investigated. This paper examines the ways in which intonation is used locally at the focal word to mark contrastive focus in Spanish. It is shown that there are four different intonational patterns that are used in the local marking of contrastive focus, including three patterns differing phonologically from broad focus utterances and one differing phonetically. The phonological marking of focus through intonation involves the use of a focal pitch accent and intermediate phrase boundary tones, while the phonetic marking involves the use of an expanded pitch range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'bad syllable contact' that arose in Old Spanish, either by syncope or by morphological concatenation, led to the application of a variety of 'repair strategies', including metathesis, which optimize the transition from one syllable to the next, though the same etymon often showed several competing variants (Lt.cat(e)natu 'chained' > OSp. cadnado ˜ candado; dezid lo 'say (pl.imper.) it' > OSp. dezidlo ˜ dezildo, MSp. decidlo). In Modern Spanish only one of these has survived, either the form that shows metathesis (when morphologically simple), or the fully faithful variant in the case of verb-plus-clitic forms. An analysis couched in Optimality Theory is presented that aims to account for the relationship between the various constraints that govern the phonological and morphological structure of Old Spanish (among them, the Syllable Contact Law, Sonority Sequencing, Faithfulness and Alignment constraints). Further, the variation that existed can be modeled according to a partially-ordered OT grammar, where the relationship between the relevant constraints is "in flux", and variation results when different candidates are favored under one of the possible permutations in ranking. Finally, it is argued that the external influence exerted by prescriptivist cultural institutions, namely the newly formed Real Academia Española, eventually impacted the variationist grammar and eliminated the productively metathesized forms, while cases of morphologically simple metathesis are lexically optimized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the acquisition literature, the phenomenon of early null subjects has received a lot of attention over the past two decades, especially in the case of non null subject languages. A number of different proposals have been advanced by Hyams (1986, 1994, 1996), Valian (1991) and Rizzi (1994), among others. Based on longitudinal data from three Spanish-speaking children and three Catalan-speaking children aged I;7-2;8, I investigate null and overt subjects in the acquisition of two null subject languages, Spanish and Catalan, and argue in favor of an analysis within the Continuity Hypothesis. Briefly, in the area of the syntax of subjects, this hypothesis predicts an early convergence between child and adult grammars. The analysis addresses the question of finiteness, i.e., whether there are differences in the behavior of subjects between .finite and non,finite constructions. The findings allow us to propose that early grammars of Spanish and Catalan have Tense, except for non-finite constructions. For these non-finite structures l propose an extension of Rizzi's Truncation Hypothesis. The theoretical consequences derived from the analysis are extended to other phenomena, such as pronominal subjects and the relative position of subjects, and other languages, such as English, and confirm the above mentioned convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a semantic analysis of several contrasting properties between the Spanish plural existential determiners unos 'a-pl.' and algunos 'some-pl.' is presented within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). Some of these properties can be directly related to the distinction between the thetic and the categorical judgment, as understood by Kuroda and Ladusaw. Others, related to plurality and the interaction of quantifiers, provide evidence for an extension of the scope of the distinction and its implementation as a procedural semantic difference. It will be argued that the determiner unos contributes a group discourse referent to a Discourse Representation Structure (DRS). This discourse referent is subject to a no linking constraint, and does not trigger box-splitting of the DRS. This forms the basis for the claim that this plural determiner participates only in thetic judgments. On the other hand, the determiner algunos is not subject to a no linking constraint and may contribute a duplex condition to the DRS. Thus, it can participate in categorical judgments. This type of judgment corresponds to a set of construction rules which yields an updated DRS in which a new discourse referent has been introduced and, in contrast to the thetic judgment, a linking condition and a duplex condition are introduced. The analysis is extended to account for the effects of contrastive focus and scopal interactions with other operators in the semantics of Spanish existential determiners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study makes a foray into the politeness strategies used by English learners of Spanish by comparing a corpus of invitations and requests recorded by 14 adult English learners of beginner-level Spanish as part of their course assignment to the data recorded by 12 native speakers. The native speakers' data was collected using discourse completion tests, which elicited offers and requests in scenarios controlled for social distance, power, and the cost of the request or offer. All the data was analysed pragmatically, by quantifying the occurrence of politeness strategies, and phonologically, by transcribing pitch accents and boundary tones in line with the guidelines of the Autosegmental Metrical framework. The results show that, depending on the situation, native speakers combine the use of different lexical and morpho-syntactic devices with the use of specific intonational patterns. Most learners at beginner level correctly use a limited range of morpho-syntactic politeness strategies appropriate to their level, and these are frequently reinforced with intonation. However, our data also show that beginner learners often transfer the intonational patterns of their first language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intensity differences were used to measure the degree of lenition of the voiced approximants in various contexts in order to contrast them with their stop variants [[b, d, g]], and in order to investigate the contexts in which they are traditionally thought to appear. 3,011 instances were taken from telephone conversations of eight native Spanish speakers from seven countries. The influence of phonetic context (post-pausal, post-nasal, post-lateral, etc.), stress, word frequency, appearance in a suffix (e.g., -ado, -aba) was determined using multiple regression. In line with traditional analyses, the results show that the voiced approximants are most lenited intervocalically and least lenited after a pause. However, post-nasal and post-lateral instances fall between these extremes. In addition, /ββ/, , and /γγ/ are also more stop-like when following [[s]] or [[h]]. Traditional analyses do not factor in the influence of stress, word frequency, word boundaries, or appearance in a suffix, yet these emerge as significant predictors. Although the distribution of the variants of these three approximants is generally thought to be due to a unitary rule, significant differences between the three suggest otherwise. When followed by a stressed syllable, /ββ/ and exhibit more constriction when compared to /γγ/, while all three phones are less lenited when they fall between two stressed syllables. /ββ/ and are also more constricted when they appear intervocalically in word-initial position when compared to word-internal intervocalic tokens, while the same is not true for /γγ/. Contra traditional descriptions, is no less lenited than /ββ/ or /γγ/ following a lateral. Instances of are also more lenited when they appear in high frequency words and less lenited in low frequency words. On the other hand, frequency is not a factor for /ββ/ and /γγ/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores adjectival degree constructions formed around the copular element de ‘of’ in Spanish such as un montón de listo (a load of smart, ‘considerably smart’), como tú de gordo (like you of fat, ‘as fat as you’), and así de alto (this of tall, ‘this tall’.) In these constructions, a predication relation takes place between the degree to which the property denoted by the adjective is possessed (the subject) and the different expressions appearing to the left of the copular element de ‘of’ (the predicate). A subdivision is made between “identificative predicative degree constructions” (IPDCs) and “evaluative predicative degree constructions” (EPDCs). In the former, the predication is done by means of a comparative clause ( {como tú/igual que tú} de gordo, like you of fat, ‘as fat as you’) or a deictic lexical unit ( así de alto, this of tall, ‘this tall’). In the latter, the predicate is a nominal expression ( un montón/mogollón/la tira/la hostia . . . } de listo, {loads/a load/the strip/the host . . . } of smart, ‘considerably smart’). This distinction is based on a number of contrasting properties that these two types of predicative degree constructions display with respect to evaluativity, combination with degree clauses introduced by para ‘for’, (in)felicity in definite environments, (in)compatibility with non-specific indefinite DPs, functioning as a nominal predicate, subject-predicate/predicate-subject word order alternations, and information structure. It is argued that the divergent semantic, pragmatic, and formal properties found in IPDCs and EPDCs come as a result of the different nature of the degree predicate involved in each type of construction and a dissimilar syntactic configuration of the predication relation (under the syntactic theory of predication in Den Dikken, Relators and linkers. The syntax of predication, predicate inversion, and copulas, MIT Press, 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from child language development supports the position that overt subjects in Southern Romance languages are left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents. Specifically, overt subjects begin to be used at the same time as other less controversially left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents, such as fronted objects and wh-questions. However, this interpretation of the data would be much more compelling if it could be shown that these constituents do not emerge at the same time in the speech of children learning languages in which overt subjects are obligatory and largely independent of discourse considerations, such as German. To this end, we examined the speech of three longitudinally studied Spanish-speaking children, Carlos, Eduardo and Graciela, and the speech of two longitudinally studied German-speaking children, Simone and Caroline. We also examined the German data of Katrin and Andreas, which was collected on a single day for each. While the Spanish-speaking children begin productively using overt subjects, fronted objects and wh-questions at a statistically similar point in development, the German-speaking children's data show that overt subjects begin to be used significantly earlier than do fronted elements and wh-questions. This supports the argument that child Southern Romance and child German are different with respect to the timing of the development of these constituents. We believe that this reflects the children's early knowledge of the structure of their target adult languages, which in the case of Southern Romance, includes left-peripheral, discourse-sensitive subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the marker a with a direct object in Spanish is an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM), which is cross linguistically a well-documented phenomenon. In Spanish, there are two main dimensions that determine a-marking of direct objects: (i) the semantic and (discourse) pragmatic properties of the direct object, such as animacy, definiteness, specificity and topicality; and (ii) the lexical semantics of the verb, such as aktionsart properties and selectional restrictions with respect to the position of the direct object. Diachronically, a-marking spreads along the Referentiality Hierarchy from personal pronouns and proper names to definite and finally indefinite noun phrases, a process that has been well examined. In this study, I focus on the influence of the lexical semantics of verb classes on this process. I present original findings from two corpus searches from the 12th to the 20th century. The data show that the diachronic evolution of a-marking crucially depends on the verb semantics of the governing predicate, and that the change proceeds according to the Constant Rate Hypothesis of Kroch. These findings suggest that a-marking in Spanish, and DOM in general, can only be described in a multi-dimensional space consisting of the semantic properties of the direct object and the lexical semantics of the verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been noticed that indefinite descriptions with the Spanish determiner unos (plural-one) have a group denotation (Villalta 1994). That meaning has been explained within DRT (Laca and Tasmowski 1996, Gutirrez Rexach 2001). Unos introduces a group referent variable in the discourse, which is associated to an atomic condition and does not trigger box-splitting (Gutirrez Rexach 2001). However, the group interpretation is unstable, and there are cases in which unos-DPs may have an individual reading too. We suggest that instability is best understood as an epistemic fact. Unos is not a semantic determiner of the plural noun that follows it but it is composed with a covert group-denoting noun, which restricts the variable domain to sets of groups. The plural noun denotes the member's class and is related to the covert group term through a group-constitute function (Barker 1992). The group interpretation is unstable because it relies on our implicit knowledge of a covert group-denoting nominal head. The variability in the group interpretation also shows the role of perception in processing groups. We propose an explanation of the instability of unos in terms of Kratzer's version of a Skolem Choice Function. Unos denotes a Perspectival Choice Function that combines with a predicate denoting a set of groups and returns a unique group. We use the perspectival argument to represent the holder of the beliefs from which the implicit meaning is inferred. When the perspectival argument is underspecified, the unos-phrase denotes a fuzzy group, which we dub a cluster. When it is anchored to the speaker, the content of the cluster becomes transparent and the distributive reading of the group may arise. We extend the Spanish case to Galician and Catalan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphological status of adverbs ending in -mente in Spanish (-ly in English) has been the object of many studies and continues to be the subject of debate. The two main proposals regarding the morphology of these adverbs treat them as either compounds or derivatives as the result of suffixation, but both hypotheses present problems. In this study an analysis will be defended which treats -mente as a phrasal affix (cf. Zwicky 1987, Nevis 1985 and Miller 1992). The notion of phrasal affix has been used to describe clitics which, from a morphological standpoint, are similar to affixes but which, simultaneously manifest characteristics of independent words. The argument for analyzing -mente as a phrasal affix is based on both synchronic and diachronic data, including some similarities with object clitic pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the phenomenon commonly referred to as "the double access reading" (DAR) of complement clause tenses, which concerns a type of restriction on the reading of the complement in relation to a matrix tense. The restrictions in question have been analyzed previously as deriving from "double anchoring" of the complement tense, both by the matrix event and by utterance time. On the basis of evidence from Spanish and Italian, this article claims that only one of these relations is genuine tense anchoring: anchoring by utterance time. The other relation, "event anchoring" is shown to derive from the role of complement constituents in "measuring out" the aspect of the matrix predicate. Spanish and Italian provide evidence that the distribution of the DAR correlates with aspectual properties of the matrix predicate. This generalization is argued to derive from the capacity of complement clauses to express a temporal "Path" along which a Theme progresses, analogous to Paths expressed by other constituents such as PPs and DPs. Tense anchoring is simplified as a consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating Root Infinitive constructions (RIs) in the adult grammar, we concentrate on a comparative view between English and Spanish. Through a care ful study of the syntactic and semantic properties of RIs, and their cross-linguistic differences, we present strong arguments for the internal structure of RIs that we propose: English RIs are deficient TPs. while Spanish RIs have an additional Comp-related functional projection FP on top. This structural difference accounts for the syntactic similarities and differences in RIs in the two languages, On the semantic side, we propose that RIs are indefinite descriptions of events, RIs crucially involve two related terms, the RI itself(John read this book?!) and the Coda (That's impossible!), where the relating predicate is an exclamative operator with scalar properties akin to the focus particle even, We show that the RI, the exclamative operator and the Coda form a tripartite structure both syntactically and semantically, in the sense of other standard analyses of quantificational constructions. Differences in temporal interpretation are shown to drive from the existence of the tripartite structure and the (un)availability of infinitival verb movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two case studies are presented of two monolingual Spanish children (ages 1;5 to 2;2 and 1;3 to 2;3)focusing on the acquisition of syllable final consonants, here analyzed as codas. On the basis of target Spanish it is predicted that word ritual codas should be acquired before word medial codas, because the former are often coronal i.e., unspecified for Place, and the latter are linked to the following onset, which involves some representational complexity. Moreover, if morphological factors play an important role in early acquisition, final codas, corresponding to plurals and to verbal endings, should be favored over medial codas. The results instead show a clear preference for medial over final codas. Codas of function words, i,e., articles, are favored as well. The analysis shows that these results are due to the prosodic and rhythmic structure of the language and relates syllable development to prosodic and rhythmic development as well as to the development of function words. The preferred foot in adult as well as in early Spanish is the trochee, and marry of the function words receive a secondary stress. It is thus argued that a stressed syllable, being the head of a foot. licenses codas in early acquisition. For the two children presented here, prosody paves the way to morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on Spanish intonation has shown that words in narrow focus often have an F0 peak within the stressed syllable, while when not in focus the peak generally follows the stressed syllable. Agreement has not been reached, however, as to an appropriate phonological analysis of this intonation pattern. It is shown here that this early F0 peak is the result of a focal pitch accent rather than the phonetic effect of a following intermediate phrase boundary. In addition, it is shown that this is not the only strategy in Spanish for conveying narrow focus through intonation, as increased F0 peak height may also be used. While either strategy may be used to convey focus in different positions within an utterance, there is a difference in frequency which is explained based on the ability to counteract downstep in all positions except initial position, where there is no previous peak .from which to downstep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]