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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 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 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]

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 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]