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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, a brief discussion of the terminology of contact phenomena is offered. The author proposes the use of interference and convergence associated with the concept of isogrammatism in order to deal with contact situations such as the one occurring in Paraguay between Spanish and Guarani. In connection with earlier papers on the topic by other scholars and by the same author, a detailed analysis of cases illustrating the interference and convergence of Paraguayan Spanish at the syntactic level is presented Awareness of the sociohistoric conditions under which the bilingual situation in Paraguay arose underlies the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper has two intertwined objectives that are consistent with the overall goal of using an interface grammar to describe different contrasts among languages. The first one is to describe the internal structure of the English resultative construction or KR, to characterize a representative sample of the KR subtypes and to render explicit the syntax-semantics interface conditions that make it possible. KR is a Macroevent that fuses two Events--an Activity and an Event proper--in the temporal sequence of a 'causal course of Events' so that this Event is the Result of the Activity. In order to reach this characterization, it is necessary to subsume Manner under Activity, Result under Change and CAUSE under 'causal course of Events'. The second objective is to expose the features that license the presence of KR in English while permitting a scarce presence of it in Spanish. KR is the Macroevent that complements the prototypical English Event, which opposes to Spanish in so far as it projects an Activity as main verb while the Spanish Event projects an Event proper. Thus, KR is not a complementary structure for the Spanish Event. Furthermore, KR reflects the typical 'open' combinatory English style, which is quite different from the Spanish 'close' one. This means that English allows for an open set of semantic relations between two words under the same structure while Spanish prefers to reduce them to (likely) one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín de Filología is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: Main clauses in Spanish optionally include a root complementizer. The presence of the complementizer adds a reportative component to the meaning of the clause. This paper attempts to characterize more precisely the kind of grammatical object represented by those reports. It argues that the Spanish main clause reports must be analyzed as instances of quotative constructions, and that the latter must be represented as involving an underlying predication between a clausal constituent and a quotative predicate. This predicate is overt in many languages, but silent in Spanish. The paper provides syntactic arguments in support of this hypothesis, as well as a comparison between the properties of those constructions and hearsay evidentiality, which is argued to be a different phenomenon. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxia is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Tejuelo: Didáctica de Lengua y Literatura is the property of Tejuelo. Didactica de la Lengua y la Literatura. Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the behaviour of VP topicalization in two unrelated languages, Hungarian and Spanish. It will show that in spite of the superficial similarity between the elements involved in such topicalization, the two languages employ a fundamentally different strategy in the derivation of these sentences. Hungarian fronts the VP material and spells it out in the form of a resumptive pronoun in the left periphery, in a mechanism similar to that described in Grohmann (2003). Spanish on the other hand generates the resumptive pronominal as an argument internal to the clause. This difference in the two derivations correlates with other differences in VP topicalization in the two languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper seeks to shed light on the diachronic evolution of collocations by examining structures formed in Modern Spanish with dar “give” plus state nouns (e.g. dar miedo “frighten”, literally, “give fear”). Using the Corpus del español, I offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteen representative dar miedo-type collocations from the 1200s to the 1900s. The results show that although the basic properties of dar miedo-type structures have remained remarkably stable over the centuries, during the Middle Ages the verb hacer “make” was used here almost as often as dar — a competition apparently inherited from Latin. While different nouns show different patterns of loss of hacer, echoing the lexical diffusion of certain grammatical changes, the 1500s saw a very sharp decline in “make” cases across the board, leading to its complete disappearance from this context by the 1800s. The loss of hacer led to a radical simplification of the collocational properties of state nouns in Spanish vis-à-vis Latin and other Modern Romance varieties. This process resulted both from language-internal factors mostly related to the lexical semantics of dar and hacer and from three key sociolinguistic processes in 16th-century Spanish: koineization, change of norm and increased standardization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH MORPHOSYNTAX: THE L1/L2 CONNECTION. Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and Juana Muñoz Liceras (Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002. Pp. xxiii + 247. $110.00 cloth, $50.00 paper. Since the middle 1980s, the study of the acquisition of Spanish has blossomed, becoming a diverse field in which new avenues for original research are still quite abundant. More specifically, this volume addresses examples of morphosyntactic optionality observed in the interlanguage grammars of Spanish language learners, both first language (L1) and second language (L2). Furthermore, it describes how morphology can trigger the acquisition of new syntactic knowledge. A major strength of the collection lies in the numerous and varied original contributions it makes to our knowledge of the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation extends the research on the use of Spanish copulas ser and estar in Venezuela to all [copula + adjective] contexts (see De Jonge 1993; Malaver 2000 for work on expressions of age). Findings reveal that resultant state, adjective class, predicate type, experience with the referent, susceptibility to change, socioeconomic level, age and frame of reference are included in the statistical model as strong predictors of estar. The analysis of the social factors shows that copula choice in Venezuelan Spanish does not show the typical S-curve pattern to strongly support an analysis of change in progress. The history of copula choice in the language suggests a development with long periods of stability and the strong conditioning of linguistic factors. Copula choice in Venezuelan Spanish shows signs that it is slowly advancing and that younger and older speakers are at different stages in this grammatical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]