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This paper addresses the grammatical challenges associated with the development of clause complexity, focusing on the performance of a group of monolingual Spanish-speaking schoolchildren with Specific Language Impairment/Developmental Language Disorder (SLI/DLD) in a longitudinal corpus of oral narrative samples. The study examines the presence of interclause relations of subordination and equivalence (hypotaxis and parataxis) in language samples of two groups: an experimental group made up of 24 schoolchildren with SLI/DLD and a control group made up of 24 schoolchildren with typical development (TD). The results show that while both groups use parataxis as the most common relation between clauses in all school grades, there is a significant decrease in paratactic relations and a significant increase in hypotactic relations from first to fourth grade of primary education. Although the development patterns are highly similar, the SLI/DLD group shows greater difficulties in mastering more complex (hypotactic) relations in fourth grade compared to the control group, indicating that it is less sophisticated in the use of these types of complex relations. These findings suggest that focused support on the most complex structures is needed towards the fourth grade of primary education, given the demands of the school academic register from 6 and 7 years of age and the potential problems that the development of clause complexity can cause in school-age children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we adduce further evidence for the reality of grammatical constructions by focusing on a highly idiosyncratic configuration from Spanish, which we call the reduplicative-topic construction. This construction is a productive syntactic pattern that functions as a “constructional hedge”. The grammatical behaviors of this construction cannot be captured by syntactocentric approaches to grammar. Instead, co-ocurring multiple constraints must be taken into account, including phonological (intonation and rhythm), morphosyntactic and semantic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the geometry of phi-features, with a special emphasis on number and gender in Spanish. We address two sets of questions: (i) are number and gender bundled together or do they constitute separate categories, and (ii) does the internal feature composition of number and gender follow a single- or a multi-valued system? Given the lack of consensus on these issues based on primary data, we approach these questions experimentally, using the phenomenon of agreement attraction: a situation in which ungrammatical sequences are perceived as grammatical when one of the NPs is erroneously identified as determining agreement. Our results offer novel support in favor of an agreement model in which number and gender are in separte projections and are valued independently. In addition, our results indicate that number but not gender in Spanish is multi-valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study one type of Spanish que (the equivalent to the complementizer "that") that can be shown to belong into the crosslinguistically restricted list of evidentials. In particular, we will claim that it encodes the (most basic) marks of non- first-hand or indirect (reported) evidence. Our point of departure is certain (apparently) independent clauses of Spanish headed by an overt complementizer (que). Some tests will be presented that support the idea that that one type of que introducing a well specified subset of root sentences shares most of the properties that have been claimed to characterize reportative evidentials in languages such as Quechua (Faller 2002, 2006). As for the properties of reportative que, it will be further shown that it does not encode any features related to epistemic modality (reliability or (im)probability) and we will propose that it is better analyzed as an illocutionary operator, affecting the illocutionary force (in line with Faller 2002 among others) and not as an epistemic modal (Izvorsky 1997 among others). In order to determine the nature of this reportative element and its origin, we contrast it with an old Spanish form, dizque, which exists nowadays in certain modern American varieties. This particle also has the properties of an evidential but behaves as an epistemic modal. In the last sections, we will propose that both evidential particles (que and dizque) are the result of a process of grammaticalization (i.e. 'upward reanalysis', or categorial change, of functional material, in the sense of Roberts and Roussou 2003) of the complex structure headed by a communication verb, dicen que "they say that". We will tentatively describe such process and introduce a hypothesis as to the nature and role of the parameter involved in the claimed reanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract: In this paper we analyze spontaneous and experimental data involving code-mixed DPs made up of English Determiners+Spanish Nouns (the casa “house”) and Spanish Determiners+English Nouns (la [the/feminine] house) from child English/Spanish simultaneous bilinguals and from L1 speakers of English, French and Spanish with different levels of proficiency in their respective L2s (Spanish in the case of L1 English and French; English in the case of L1 Spanish). We show that early child bilinguals and adult simultaneous bilinguals (production data) and L1 speakers of Spanish (experimental data) favor mixings where Spanish provides the functional category, the Determiner, over mixings where English does. We also show that when confronted with these mixed DPs adult L1 Spanish speakers and non-native speakers share a preference for the English D followed by a preference for the default gender marking in Spanish, the masculine (el [the/masculine] house). In the case of the L1 Spanish speakers, this preference is overridden by the “analogical criterion”, (la [the/feminine] house), which consists of assigning the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent (“casa” is feminine) to the English Noun. We provide a linguistic account of these preferences based on the intrinsic Gender feature of the Spanish Noun and the intrinsic Gender Agreement feature or the Spanish Determiner and argue that the cognitive mechanisms employed by the bilingual, the Spanish L1 speaker and the Spanish L2 speaker in spontaneous production and in the grammaticality judgments task make different use of these linguistic units. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a study on the systematization of the contextual varieties of yod, the glide in phonetic terms. This paper focuses on the development of the Spanish vowels giving emphasis on the vowels before the palatal glides and obstruents. It also focuses on the historical grammar that evolved into a confused chapter in historical grammar of the Hispano-Romance. The author attempts to point out significant issues on the major anomalies in the development by emphasizing on the well-established sounds to those that shift from the general pattern.

This article examines the impact of instruction on L2 learners' ability to recognize and produce differential object marking in Spanish as measured by three written tasks: a grammatical preference task, a cued sentence production task, and a discourse-length narrative task. These assessment measures are hypothesized to tap both implicit and explicit knowledge based on criteria proposed by Ellis (2005) and Ellis, Loewen, Elder, Erlam, Philp & Reinders (2009). English-speaking learners (n = 123) were randomly assigned to one of three instructional treatments: input flood, enhanced input flood, and explicit grammar. The results indicate a significant advantage for the explicit grammar group on the preference task and the cued sentence production task. The remaining two groups showed modest improvement after the treatment, but with no significant differences between them. These results confirm the advantage of explicit instruction vis-à-vis more implicit treatments, although this advantage seems to be limited to controlled assessment measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adds to the growing body of research focused on second-language (L2) variation and constitutes the first large-scale study of the production of potentially variable grammatical structures in Spanish by English-speaking learners. The overarching goal of the project is to assess the range of forms used and the degree to which native and L2 speakers of Spanish differ in several independently defined syntactic or discourse-based contexts. The contexts examined in the current study have been the object of sociolinguistic research in monolingual environments and include the following: copula contrast, mood distinction, past-time reference, future-time reference, and subject expression. Interview data from 16 English-speaking learners and 16 native speakers of Spanish from a variety of countries, all of whom are part of a single speech community in the United States, are examined. The analysis focuses on the range of forms used in each of the contexts investigated and the frequency with which these forms appear. A possible relation of individual characteristics, such as country of origin, years of language study, and time spent abroad, to this frequency of use is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]