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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]

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]

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]

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]