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This paper analyzes the instructions embedded in the meaning of the evidential points of view materialized by the encontrar [find] + direct object + objective predicative structure and by different tenses (conditional, imperfect, morphological future and periphrastic future) in Spanish. Besides, to show similarities and divergences between Spanish and French on this topic, translations of those structures into the latter language are proposed. The corpus is composed by actual statements taken from the CREA and Internet news portals. The theoreticalmethodological framework is provided by the Dialogical Approach to Argumentation and Polyphony, which, unlike referentialist and cognitivist perspectives of evidentiality, characterizes the evidential meaning in relation to the dialogical and polyphonic-argumentative representation posed by the enunciation regarding the discursive cause that triggers it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the properties of preceding pronominal subjects in Caribbean Spanish and to provide an appropriate syntactic analysis for them. On the basis of the Head to Spec movement hypothesis proposed by Matushansky, Vicente and Citko, among others, we propose a novel analysis con cerning the conventional assumption in licensing null subjects. Concretely, it is assumed that the preceding pronominal subject is a spelled out element of the verb that has moved to Spec-IP, and this operation is realized as a clause-level compensation for the weakening of verbal inflection in Caribbean Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain the alternation between the prepositions a and de when used as complements to the adjectives contrario 'contrary', diferente 'different', and distinto 'distinct', as illustrated in Yo no fui distinta __mi madre 'I wasn't different __my mother', where both prepositions can be inserted. Relying on Langacker's3 notion of construal, the hypothesis is that a construes the comparison in the sense of 'direction toward' while de construes it in the sense of 'separation' or 'point of departure', and that these senses should be reflected in the usage contexts of the two prepositions. The quantitative analysis of some 800 cases extracted from Davies'4 two billion word Corpus del español, however, shows no indication of a and de setting up different construals. This lack of correlation between usage and semantics appears to be due to the diachronic generalization of a as complement of the three adjectives, thus relegating the use of de to specific collocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic classification of names discriminates the collective from the senses of "grouping" and "set", however, the confluence of traits related to "meeting" or "encounter" has greatly hindered the determination of this type of expressions. In this paper, the particularities of collective names will be described, emphasizing the sense of 'collection', as a definitive feature of a nominal semantic category that presents a greater lexical variability than that described by the Grammatical Tradition and registers a defining syntactic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a problematic issue: the possibility of coordination between elements that appear in the left margin of the utterance. The methodology is a pragmalinguistic approach and a macrosyntactic proposal applied on a corpus. The author proposes a structure of the utterance and analyses the combinatorial possibilities within the left margin, limiting the research to the coordination by conjunction y. The possible interpretations of the results are: to consider a single area on left periphery or more, and consider whether the connectives (discourse markers) belong to that area or are extrasentential elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, morphological studies have started to focus again on compounding, from a crosslinguistic point of view as well as for the particular case of Spanish. In this paper, we will first review a number of classifications of Spanish compounds, with special attention to coordinative compounds. Then we will focus our attention on a particular kind of construction which has been sometimes included among coordinative compounds: the nominal combination (madre-hija) that appears in the relación madre-hija ('mother-daughter relationship') structure. It will be shown that there are formal characteristics which take these structures away from compounds and bring them closer to free syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]