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This paper offers an in-depth analysis of a novel elliptical construction in Spanish, dubbed Topic-Remnant Elided Polar Questions (or polar TREQs in short). A detailed examination of polar TREQs in Spanish will provide evidence for the claim that (a) they are a type of clausal ellipsis, triggered by the presence of an [E]-feature on C, and (b) the remnant is a topicalized XP that undergoes movement out of the ellipsis site. Furthermore, the analysis of polar TREQs in various contexts (in particular, with respect to the so-called connectivity effects) confirms the need of syntactic identity between the linguistic antecedent and the ellipsis site. Moreover, an examination of the patterns related to the presence or absence of an overt complementizer in this elliptical construction provides empirical support for Merchant's (2001) Sluicing-COMP Generalization. In summary, this paper not only provides a comprehensive account of the syntactic intricacies of a new elliptical construction in Spanish, but also provides valuable insights into the broader landscape of elliptical phenomena in this language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the presence of Anglicisms in the field of drinks in Spanish. After analyzing 22 digital media using the search tool "Observatorio Lázaro", a sample of seventy-eight anglicized non-adapted lexical units has been excerpted. The extracted terms refer to various types of alcoholic drinks, some of which already have a Spanish equivalent, whereas in other cases, those terms refer to new concepts that do not have Spanish equivalent due to its novelty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of Spanish verbs of becoming (e.g., volverse rico 'to become rich'), also known as pseudocopular or semicopular verbs, has received relatively little attention in the literature. Bybee & Eddington (2006) (B&E) analyze these verbs employing an exemplar model based on frequency and semantic similarity. The current paper presents an analysis of verbs of becoming based on the notion of cluster concepts (Jackendoff 2002, 2019, 1983), set within a scale, as an alternative account to B&E's, that explains the behavior of this class of verbs in a more precise and comprehensive way. The current study shows that there are strong tendencies in the use of adjectives with a given verb of becoming, which correlate to their use with the copular verbs ser/estar. Crucially, the cluster concept model accounts for uses of adjectives that do not fall into any particular grouping in B&E's model. A corpus study supports the analysis. The current study represents an original contribution in that it is the only study that treats verbs of becoming using the notion of cluster concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been claimed in the literature that referential null subjects receive definite readings in consistent null-subject languages, like Spanish. That is why they are said to display the typical behavior of definite pronouns (referential pro). However, referential null subjects can receive indefinite readings under the following conditions: i) the antecedent must be a bare plural, ii) the indefinite null argument is interpreted as a bare noun, typically as an internal argument, and iii) identity of sense anaphora is involved. Crucially, referential null objects appear under similar conditions, and receive indefinite readings in European Spanish. This suggests that the gap could be analyzed in the same way. In this paper, I argue that both null arguments should not be analyzed as empty pronominals (pro), given the syntactic behavior that they show. By contrast, I will argue that an argument ellipsis analysis should be assumed, given that the internal argument position is occupied by an indefinite, non-specific bare noun, the null gap can receive sloppy readings, and the omission is not as 'big' as the one at verb-stranding VP-ellipsis, nor as 'small' as the one at nominal ellipsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic features --nuclear pitch configurations and pitch range-- of neutral and oriented interrogative utterances in the Spanish of Mexico City. We carried out a study of polar and wh- questions recorded in the free conversation module of the Corpus Norma Lingüística Culta (Lope Blanch 1971) and Habla Popular de la Ciudad de México (Lope Blanch 1976). The findings of the qualitative analysis show: i) the nuclear pitch configuration L* (L)H% --with the variants L* (L)H%, L* ¡H%, !H* ¡H%-- in information-seeking yes-no questions and confirmation questions, ii) the nuclear configuration L* L% documented in neutral wh- questions, and the boundary tone H% produced in the non-neutral condition --hypothetical or confirmative-- of the utterance; iii) the use of the pitch range as a potential prosodic resource for the expression of lesser or greater knowledge about the expected answer. The spontaneous speech data partially confirm the descriptions based on discourse completion tasks for this variety of Spanish (de-la-Mota et al. 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. In Mexican Spanish, the indefinite quantifier "uno que otro" is used to refer to low cardinalities of entities separated over space or time. Even though they have a strictly singular form, noun phrases with "uno que otro" always refer to more than one entity. And, despite their notional content of plurality, they reject collective predicates. In this paper we propose a semantic analysis of this expression as a distributive indefinite, that is, an indefinite whose reference covaries as a function of a distributive operator, in the way that adnominal distributive numerals do in other languages (Gil, 1983; Cable, 2014). Distributive numerals are supposed not to exist in Spanish; however, we claim that "uno que otro" is a distributed share marker (Choe, 1987; Bosnić et al 2020) related to a set of events (Balusu, 2006; Cable, 2014; Romero, 2006). This set is necessarily plural, although of low cardinality, and involves the precondition that its elements (atomic events) occur in non-contiguous time or space intervals. The semantic characterization of "uno que otro" as a distributive indefinite captures its referential dependence, its plural sense, its rejection of collective predicates and its content of separation as a secondary effect of a precondition on the events over which it is distributed. We thus show that Spanish has an adnominal expression of the same semantic nature as distributive numerals, with the precision that it requires distribution over events and not over entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explain the differential object marking (DOM) of inanimate objects in Spanish. Generally, animate objects in Spanish are marked with an A morpheme; however, it is possible for the A-marker to appear also with inanimate objects in specific circumstances. In this article, I defend the idea that the marking of inanimate objects in Spanish responds to the interaction of the feature of existence presupposition of the verb with the feature that dominates the object's specificity. The analysis will be done using mainly two theoretical tools: the feature geometry of Harley & Ritter (2002) and Chomsky's (2013, 2015) labeling theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine existing analyses for (restrictive) relative clauses and propose an analysis for Spanish relatives from the perspective of a lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). We will provide a summary of the main proposals in the literature and examine the questions that any analysis of relative clauses should address. Our TAG approach synthesises the descriptive and theoretical advantages of existing models (the head external analysis, the raising analysis, and the matching analysis) and offers a solution to some of the main problems that have been observed in the literature. We will focus on the internal configuration of relative clauses, their structural position, and the category of the expression que in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguous relative clauses with two possible antecedent nouns have been widely studied in Spanish since they cast doubt on the universality of syntactic parsing principles. Current research suggests that there is an early contribution of prosodic information in the disambiguation of this kind or sentences in oral comprehension and production tasks. In this paper we present two comprehension experiments of locally ambiguous relative clauses with two possible attachment sites in Spanish, in which different prosodic parameters were manipulated to yield either congruous or incongruous pairings of prosody and syntax, with the aim of testing their influence on listeners' attachment preferences of the ambiguous clause and on their response times. Additionally, fundamental frequency (F0) and temporal (pause distribution) prosodic parameters were manipulated in different subexperiments so as to assess their separate contribution to participants' performance. Our results confirm an effective and relatively early use of prosodic information by listeners during language processing. In particular, congruous prosody with syntax generally facilitates participants' responses, though this effect was found to vary across the two attachment options. Finally, F0 and temporal prosodic features were found to make a similar contribution to participants' responses, with few occasional differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the effect of mood on the availability of an existential interpretation of negative words such as nadie in the complement of affective emotive factive predicates in Spanish. In these contexts, the subjunctive mood allows nadie to function as a NPI, and it may be interpreted either as a non-negated existentially quantified expression, ∃x, equivalent to alguien, or as negative universally quantified expression, ∀x¬, equivalent to the English "nobody". On the other hand, the indicative mood allows only for a negative universal interpretation, as ∀x¬. An account of this phenomenon is proposed in terms of the notion of settledness. A proposition expressed by an indicative complement is asserted, and the speaker is signaling their intention that it be settled in the context set. It is said that the proposition is grammatically settled. By expressing a proposition in the subjunctive mood, the speaker is not intending that it be settled at the time of utterance, and, as a consequence it is in a grammatically unsettled state (p/¬p: a state in which it is undetermined whether p or ¬p). A negative word such as nadie is analyzed as denoting a quantity scale <∀, ∃>. Within an asserted complement, the interpretation of nadie is fixed at the highest, most informative, point in the scale, ∀. On the other hand, within the grammatically unsettled complement of an affective predicate, which allows for scale reversal, the interpretation of nadie is not fixed. This indeterminacy allows it to assume the value of the lowest point, ∃. It is noted that this possibility provides an expressive tool which may be used to add an emphatic hue to an utterance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]