Search

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]

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]

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 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]