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Deísmo is a non-standard dialectal phenomenon consisting of the insertion of a non-required preposition de 'of' before a non-finite clause: Me apetece (de) salir 'I want to go out'. In most papers, de is analyzed as a defective complementizer that does not change the meaning of the sentence. However, deísmo has also been associated with a prospective meaning with some verbs, and de has been considered as a marker of evidentiality with visual perception verbs. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis for deísmo constructions, in which de is located in a projection below that occupied by de in dequeísmo constructions). Secondly, we will show the results of a questionnaire whose objective is to figure out if there is an evidential meaning associated with deísmo. For the questionnaire, we made a preliminary search in Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER) and in Spanish Web Corpus 2018 (Sketch Engine). From this, we selected the most frequent verbs with deísmo in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). An examination of the results revealed that, on the one hand, deísmo is lexically associated with certain verbs, but not necessarily with all of the same semantic class; and on the other hand, that there is not an evidential meaning associated with deísmo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19econgrès international des linguistes, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed only in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in Journal of Semantics 35(1):1–41, 2017), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016; Portner and Rubinstein in Natural Language Semantics 28:343–393, 2020) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Hispanic & Lusophone Linguistics is the property of De Gruyter 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 revisits the phenomenon of inalienable possession between a dative argument and a body-part noun in Spanish. Specifically, it looks at contexts where the inalienable possession interpretation is obligatory, as in constructions containing monoeventive verbs of perception, and those where the inalienable reading becomes optional, namely with bi-eventive predicates denoting a change of state. I offer a possessor raising and applicative hybrid analysis, whereby the inalienable possessor originates inside the body-part DP and raises to the specifier of an applicative head to license dative case; the position ApplP occupies in the derivation determines the dative's interpretation as a mere possessor (low applicative), or as an affected possessor as well (middle applicative). Alternatively, cases where the dative is not understood as the inalienable possessor but simply as affected occur when this argument is an additional one originating in the specifier of the middle applicative head, and the possessor of the body-part noun is encoded internally via a clitic or strong possessive, or by means of a genitive PP inside the DP. Thus, I propose the existence of two types of affected applicative heads: (i) one whose specifier is available for the possessor inside the possessum DP to move into to be case licensed, and (ii) another introducing an additional argument in its specifier. Additionally, this analysis accounts for the complementary distribution between dative possessors and possessive determiners in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Lingüística de el Colegio de México 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 presents an ongoing work on the multilingual event-type ontology SynSemClass, where multilingual verbal synonymy is formalized in terms of syntactic and semantic properties. In the ontology, verbs are grouped into synonym classes, both monolingually and cross-lingually. Specifically, verbs are considered to belong to the same class if they both express the same meaning in a specific context, and their valency frame can be mapped to the set of roles defined for a particular class. SynSemClass is built following a bottom-up approach where translational equivalents are automatically extracted from parallel corpora and annotated by human annotators. The task of the annotators consists in mapping the valency frame of a particular verb with the set of roles defined for the class where the verb is included as a potential class member, establishing links to external resources, and selecting relevant examples. The Spanish part of the ontology currently contains 257 classes enriched with Spanish synonyms. The resulting resource provides finegrained syntactic and semantic information on multilingual verbal synonyms and links to other existing monolingual and multilingual resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso 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.)

In this paper, we study a syntactic construction that has received little attention in the study of Spanish grammar (La masa de pizza congela perfectamente, 'Pizza dough freezes perfectly'). It is characterized by the presence of a verb in a non-pronominal intransitive variant, with property interpretation. This construction is related to mediopassive sentences or generic middles (Las camisas de algodón se lavan fácilmente, 'Cotton shirts wash easily'), as well as to the anticausative construction (La camisa se secó al sol, 'The shirt dried in the sun'), a relationship that has not always been highlighted in previous studies, which are usually based on a short list of verbs. Taking as a point of departure both the verbal classification found in ADESSE and data from Corpus del Español: Web/Dialects, the construction under study is described, paying special attention to the types of verbs found in it in order to check if they coincide with the verbs found in mediopassive sentences or the anticausative construction. In addition, our study provides new data on the linguistic factors (presence of a manner adverb or other modifiers, negation), as well as on the extralinguistic factors (type of text, geographical distribution) involved in this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Catalan Journal of Linguistics is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona 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.)

Contact linguists have proposed that core borrowing can indicate language attrition – as the loan replaces its native-origin counterpart – while cultural borrowing expands the lexicon (Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical linguistics: An introduction, 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, Tadmor and Haspelmath (Tadmor, Uri & Martin Haspelmath. 2009. Loanwords in the world's languages: A comparative handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter) found that in core borrowing cases, coexistence of the foreign and the native forms is more common than replacement. In this paper, I explore coexistence and replacement scenarios of Spanish-origin core loan verbs and their native-origin counterparts in Paraguayan Guaraní. These loans have been previously described as instances of code-switching (Estigarribia, Bruno. 2017. Insertion and backflagging as mixing strategies underlying Guaraní-Spanish mixed words. In Bruno Estigarribia & Justin Pinta (eds.), Guaraní linguistics in the 21st century, 315–347. Leiden: Brill; Kallfell, Guido. 2016. ¿Cómo hablan los paraguayos con dos lenguas?: gramática del jopara. Asunción: CEADUC). Tokens of highly frequent native-origin verbs along with their broadly equivalent Spanish-origin loans were extracted from 40 interviews and were correlated with the senses of each verb. Results show that some Spanish verb loans replace its native-origin counterpart to convey only one of its senses, while the native-origin form remains the preferred form to convey the other senses. This specialized use also suggests that these semantically specialized Spanish verb loans are not code-switches but rather integrated lexical items in Guaraní. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitive causative change of state (TCoS) verbs elicit scalar readings, distinguishing them between: upper-bounded verbs (e.g., dry), denoting a culminating change of state, and lower-bounded verbs (e.g., wrinkle), denoting a change from a zero to a non-zero value (or from one value to another) regarding the property described by the semantic core of the verb. In their eventive reading, transitive experiencer object (TEO) verbs (e.g., calm down, delight) also denote causative eventualities able to yield scalar inferences. This study investigates whether TEO verbs are also associated with a minimum or maximum standard degree, proposing a similar subdivision of TEO verbs into lower-bounded items (delight) and upper-bounded items (calm down). In a forced-choice selection experiment we tested the impact of the standard degree (bound) of the semantic core of Spanish TEO verbs on the availability of lower-bounded or upper-bounded readings comparing them to TCoS verbs. Results revealed that the factor bound was significant to the extent that both lower-bounded TEO and TCoS predicates yielded the response compatible with a lower-bounded reading significantly more often than predicates that possess a maximum degree, supporting the distinction between lower and upper bounded items. Further, a significant effect of verb type was also observed, differentiating a change of state on the mental (TEO) versus the physical (TCoS) levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how the negative particle no interacts with Spanish deverbal nominalizations that denote an event. Firstly, it is pointed out that, when preceded by negation, these nominalizations only give rise to the inhibited eventuality reading, contrary to what happens with verbs, which give rise to both the inhibited eventuality reading and the negated eventuality reading. Secondly, it is shown that, when these nominalizations co-occur with no, their lexical aspect is modified, as they share properties with events, but with states as well. Thirdly, a proposal of analysis for is presented. We claim that both the interpretation and lexical aspect of this construction follow from the interaction of negation with the syntactic configuration of the nominalization and, specifically, with the projection responsible for the triggering of the eventuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passive sentences have been traditionally analyzed in French by descriptive studies in the aim of elucidating the use of the auxiliary verbs être and se faire (Tesnière 1988; Le Goffic 1993; Riegel et coll. 1994; Le Bellec 2014). In Spanish, the formally equivalent auxiliary verbs are ser and hacerse but their use is not concurrent since hacerse is semantically restricted to express beneficial actions (e.g., Se hizo masajear la espalda, He had his back massaged). The goal of our paper is to compare –in spoken French and Spanish– the grammatical and lexical means used in the topicalization of non-volitional patients involved in unpleasant actions. Our results showed that French speakers produced 59.3% of passive sentences, whereas Spanish speakers showed a preference to conceptualize the Patient-victim as an accusative within active voice sentences (37.5%). Concerning the passive sentences produced by each group, French speakers showed an overt preference for the auxiliary se faire (78.9%), whereas in Spanish the Patient-victim's topicalization was most frequently marked by a Latin-derived prepositional object complement (58.8%). Our paper indicates that the topicalization of a Patient-victim is a distinctive typological feature between French and Spanish, and suggests the salience of passive-perspective conceptualizations in French for the semantic domain of unpleasant actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies rhetorical questions containing cognitive verbs that function as reproaches in Spanish. Its two main goals are to determine the degree of specialization of rhetorical questions as reproaches and to examine the characterization of reproaching as a speech act, indicating the distinctive features that distinguish it from other similar speech acts. Based on a contextual analysis of approximately 500 instances of reproaches in conflict talk drawn from the Spanish Royal Academy's Corpes XXI corpus, I identify and describe the most commonly used cognitive verbs and syntactic structures used in rhetorical questions. The results show that reproach is a reactive-provocative speech act in which the speaker reacts to a contradiction perceived in their interlocutor's words, actions or thoughts. The speaker appeals to their interlocutor's moral conscience, making them think about this inconsistency; finally, the speaker creates the expectation of a duty that should have been carried out by the interlocutor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the possibility that Spanish intransitive verbs showing middle marking with no associated change of valency are a source of non-oppositional middle verbs. In order to do so, a study is conducted of the historical evolution of the middle-marked Spanish verb reír(se) 'to laugh' as well as other semantically related verbs (such as alegrar(se) 'to be happy, pleased', regocijarse 'to rejoice' and burlar(se), mofar(se), escarnecer(se) 'to mock, to ridicule, to make fun of'), where the presence of the middle marker is associated with a valency-reducing diathesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research 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 Journal of Language & Law / Revista de Llengua i Dret is the property of Revista de Llengua i Dret 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.)

The semantics of zero-derivation/conversion has attracted renewed interest both as a subject of description and as a means towards refined descriptions of the process. This paper takes the latter stance and compares which semantic categories occur in zero-derivation/conversion and in overt affixation in two languages with a different morphological model: English and Spanish. For attestation and distribution of the semantic categories, the paper relies on a stratified sample of denominal verbs collected from two comparable corpora: the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. The sample consists in sets of ca. 50 denominal verb-forming resources, one per affixation process, namely affixation by -ate, -(i)fy, -ize/-ise, -en, en- in English, a-...-ar, en-...-ar, -ear, -ecer, -(i)ficar, -izar in Spanish, and zero-derivation/conversion in both languages. The results are contrasted within and across affixes/processes, within each language and across the two languages for the adequacy of a description as zero-derivation or as conversion. Statistical analysis shows that the process/affixes form a cline with overlaps and closer associations between specific affixes/processes and semantic categories, but no clear divide between zero-derivation/conversion and the rest of processes as far as the semantic categories are concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the historical evolution of the Spanish causative micro-constructions with the motion verbs llevar ('take') and traer ('bring') (e.g., el miedo llevó al ladrón a cometer un error, 'the fear caused the thief to make a mistake'). In order to reconstruct the historical development of these micro-constructions between the 13th and 20th centuries, all causative uses of llevar and traer were extracted from the Corpus del Diccionario Histórico. This corpus was annotated for a series of formal and semantic parameters that count as indexes of grammaticalization, and was submitted to a quantitative productivity analysis. The results point to the existence of a subschema formed of verbs of caused accompanied motion, which has semantically specialized in the expression of indirect causation. From a formal point of view, this subschema is characterized by a low level of syntactic incorporation of the causative verb and the infinitive. In addition, it is shown that the productivity of the causative micro-constructions under study is determined by semantic changes experienced by llevar and traer as full lexical verbs during the history of Spanish. The late development of the micro-construction with llevar is explained by the initial tendency of this verb to express motion events not bounded by an endpoint. From the 16th century onwards, the decline in the micro-construction with traer and the rise in the micro-construction with llevar results from the consolidation of the deictic meaning of the verb pair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies analysing the differences in emotionality in first and second language suggest that affective content of lexical items is modulated in certain contexts. This paper investigates the differences in valence and arousal ratings for 300 early words, in both oral and written modalities, through speakers' subjective appraisal of words given by two immersion groups of Spanish late bilinguals (Chinese and European) compared with a group of native speakers. The main goal of our study is to identify the lexical areas where variability occurs, regarding to a set of affective (emotional charge and intensity), grammatical (nouns, adjectives and verbs) and semantic (concreteness) features of words. Our results show that valence is the dimension where the greatest variability is observed between native and bilinguals, although the influence of the independent factors differs considerably. Besides, arousal yields illuminating data regarding the grammatical category of words and differentiation between the groups of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies verbal encoding of motion events by Czech advanced learners of Spanish and Spanish native speakers. Since these languages differ in terms of Talmy's (2000) typology of motion encoding, the study aims to assess to what extent the learners acquired the Thinking-for-Speaking patterns (Slobin 1996) of the L2. To this end, written narratives by natives and learners are examined and compared. The results show that the construction "path verb + manner complement", a typical structure for verb-framed languages such as Spanish, is used significantly less often by the learners compared with the natives. The results also indicate that L1 interference happens when expressing boundary crossing situations in Spanish by the learners, since they tend to use a Manner of motion verb. [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.)

The intensive support verbs selected by the predicative nouns of the class in Old French and Old Spanish are presented and analyzed in this paper. The lexically constrained combinations between these verbs and nouns are described, and the basic metaphors that govern the selection of intensive structures are identified. We observe that a synchronic perspective would prefer a lexical selection-based description of collocations, whereas a diachronic perspective would prefer the use of conceptual metaphors. We highlight certain similarities between the two languages studied, but also some differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at presenting a lexicographical proposal focused on Spanish expressions that are made up of a verb and an adverbial idiom (e.g. dormir a pierna suelta, estar hasta los pelos, luchar/defender a brazo partido, reír a mandíbula batiente and ver/mirar con buenos ojos). These polilexical units have been defined by several linguists as complex collocations (e.g. Barrios Rodríguez 2015; García-Page Sánchez 2004, 2013; Koike 2001, 2005; Penadés Martínez 2017). Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as dictionaries of idioms, have managed these units in different ways. In fact, they are sometimes labelled as verbal idioms, and other times as adverbial ones. Considering these facts, this paper proposes a taxonomy for the Diccionario fraseológico multilingüe digital (DFMD), a digital multilingual dictionary of idioms currently being compiled at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Our proposal is based on the comparison between the lexicographical data currently available on the one hand, and the information that can be obtained from the academic corpus CORPES XXI on the other. As a result of this comparison, we identify four classes of possible relations between adverbial idioms and verbs that precede them. For each of these relationships, we suggest an ad hoc lemmatization, the purpose of which is to encourage the development of users' phraseological competence by providing them with clear, reliable and easy-to-use information. As a result, in the following sections we introduce, firstly, the state of the art concerning complex collocations (Section 1) and, secondly, the corpus collected and the parameters adopted for its selection and analysis (Section 2). Later, we describe our lexicographical proposal and its application to the DFMD by offering some examples of records for the Spanish-Italian / Italian-Spanish repertoire (Section 3). Finally, we infer some conclusions and food for thought for future investigations (Section 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new approach to the alternate use of Spanish hacerse 'to make (reflexive)' and volverse 'to (re)turn (reflexive)' to express a change of state. Hacerse and volverse belong to the core of the family of change-of-state verbs in Spanish and constitute a prime example of alternating forms. The aim is to evaluate the importance of the notion of construal as an explanation to alternation. We do this by testing one of the major explanations regarding the difference between hacerse and volverse, namely that of Delbecque and van Gorp (Delbecque, Nicole & Lise van Gorp. 2012. Hacerse y volverse como nexos pseudo-copulativos. Bulletin hispanique 114(1). 277–306, Delbecque, Nicole & Lise van Gorp. 2015. The pseudo-copular use of the Spanish verbs hacerse and volverse: Two types of change. Cognitextes 13), who suggest that the distinction is one of construal. A sentence completion task involving priming and non-priming visual stimuli is used to investigate to what extent the distinct conceptual images associated with hacerse and volverse affect the choice of verb in given contexts. The results show little evidence of the importance of construal for the choice of verb. Instead, established V + ADJ combinations seem to have a greater impact on choosing either verb. This calls into question the applicability of construal as an explanation to alternation, especially from the perspective of choice between alternating forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that constructions with subject-experiencer psychological verbs are adjectival passives, contra the received view that constructions are verbal passives across the board. We put forth a battery of morphological, syntactic and semantic tests to support our claim. The divide, we argue, is based on the individual-level/stage-level distinction, rather than on the lexical category of the participle. We provide a theoretical, aspect-based account that generates the distribution of ser and estar in verbal and adjectival participles and paves the way for a comprehensive analysis of the ser and estar distribution across other constructions where the alternation is attested, such as underived adjectives and prepositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the means of expressing positive epistemic judgement in Spanish and Italian: modals in their epistemic interpretation, epistemic adverb + indicative/subjunctive, with particular attention to the verbs creer/credere and their possible combination with the subjunctive. The constructions are analysed through the prism of cognitive grammar, specifically Langacker's theory of grounding. It is argued that the different types of epistemic judgement are analogous to nominal grounding elements (demonstrative pronouns, the definite article and relative quantifiers). The subjunctive after epistemic adverbs and verbs (such as tal vez or credere) is seen as the verbal counterpart of the relative quantifier some. Analyses suggest that this analogy helps to define the semantic difference between similar structures with the indicative and to resolve questions concerning the function of the subjunctive in epistemic contexts, such as the degree of uncertainty or the speaker's attitude towards the propositional content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Complutense Journal of English Studies is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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 Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filologia Hispanica is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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 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.)

Light verb constructions (LVCs) permeate the oral and written productions of native (and nonnative) speakers of typologically different languages (e.g., Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Sino-Tibetan languages, among others). From a cross-linguistic perspective, LVCs share basic combinatory and predicative features. However, semantic and morphosyntactic contrasts are visible even in closely related languages such as Spanish and Italian. Therefore, this paper aims to show some of the most significant asymmetries existing between Peninsular Spanish light verb constructions and their equivalent forms in Italian. The ultimate goal of this research is to highlight some of the systematic contrasts that affect specific semantic classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the distribution of a phonetically null pronoun and the clitic lo referring to a proposition as the direct object (DO) of cognition and communication verbs in Spanish. The use of this null object referring to propositions is found cross-dialectally in Spanish, and this paper argues that the completeness of the proposition constrains in crucial ways the distribution of these two propositional anaphors. The analysis of five different cases in which the DO pronoun refers to an incomplete proposition illustrates that the null object is the anaphor preferred when the proposition being referred to is incomplete, whereas the propositional pronoun lo is preferred to refer to complete propositions. Completeness of the proposition - defined here as a gradient feature and not a binary distinction - is discussed in relation to the notion of saliency or accessibility of the referent and the data analyzed in this article for propositional anaphora is discussed in relation to NP anaphora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish synchronically depends on the referential features of the direct object, such as animacy and referentiality, and on the semantics of the verb. Recent corpus studies suggest that the diachronic development proceeds along the same features, which are ranked in scales, namely the Animacy Scale, the Referentiality Scale and the Affectedness Scale. The present paper investigates this development in ditransitive constructions from the 17th to the 20th century. Ditransitive constructions in Spanish are of particular interest since the literature assumes that the differential object marker a is often blocked by the co-occurrence of the case marker a for the indirect object. The paper focuses on the conditions that enhance or weaken this blocking effect. It investigates three types of constructions with a ditransitive verb: (i) constructions with indirect objects realized as a-marked full noun phrases, (ii) constructions with indirect objects as clitic pronouns, and (iii) constructions with non-overt indirect objects. The results clearly show that DOM is more frequent with (iii) and less frequent with (i). Thus the results support the observation that the co-occurrence of an a-marked indirect object (partly) blocks a-marking of the direct object to a certain extent. Furthermore, the results show for the first time that indirect objects realized as clitic pronouns without the marker a have a weaker blocking effect, but still a stronger one than constructions without overt indirect objects. In summary, the paper presents new and original evidence of the competition between arguments in a diachronic perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that gapping in Spanish is not a single phenomenon and can be derived from different source structures. The first type of gapping in Spanish involves clausal coordination and is thus derived through TP-deletion, whereas the second type contains low coordination below TP, which allows it to be derived by either vP-deletion or Across-The-Board (ATB) verb movement whose availability depends on the subject-verb agreement patterns found in gapping. This approach also extends to cases where the conjuncts in gapping display various noncanonical word orders, which also fall under two types of gapping and can be analyzed using the same mechanisms as those applicable to SVO-conjuncts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse Spanish verbal constructions that accept both the clitic se and the prefix auto- in order to determine whether these formations are or are not more agentive than the corresponding non-prefixed constructions (autocriticarse vs. criticarse). The proposal arises from the discussion about the different semantic values observed in formations with auto- and explores the distinctive features of such formations in contrast to those without auto-. We carried out a twofold analysis: first, we applied a set of tests of agentivity and control to a sample of 130 verbs with auto- extracted from the Modern Spanish Reference Corpus (CREA) and compared the sample with its non-prefixed pronominal pairs (i.e. verbs with clitic se). Second, we carried out a series of surveys using similar tests with Spanish speakers to guarantee the acceptability of the corpus interpretations. We argue that prefixed constructions show a higher degree of agentivity and control by external arguments, which results in the impossibility of bidirectionally replacing these constructions with those that only have the clitic se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a study that aimed to reflect on the implications of the use of cambio verbs in the acquisition process of Spanish as an L2 by Brazilian learners and to analyze the effects of a pedagogical intervention based on a self-instruction about these verbs in predicative constructions, contrasting their aspectual properties. The experiment was carried out with a group of participants who performed sentence acceptability judgment tasks with the target verbs (ponerse, quedarse, hacerse and volverse) in predicative constructions, interspersed by the self-instruction. Data analysis revealed that there was a slight increase of the accuracy and the reaction times decreased afterthe instruction. These results, although without a solid statistical significance, may indicate the potential of this pedagogical intervention to contribute with the learning of cambio verbs in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a corpus study of 1st and 2nd person plural verbs and their reflexive clitics in a sample of spoken Valencian Catalan varieties. Previous studies have observed that the reflexive clitic SE, which standardly appears with 3rd person verb inflection, can co-occur with verbs marked for 1st and 2nd person plural in some varieties of Spanish and Catalan. With respect to the latter language, it has been mentioned that the phenomenon is especially extensive in the Valencian Catalan varieties. By means of an examination of data from the corpus Parlars it will be shown that even within Valencian Catalan, there is considerable variation with respect to the following factors: (i) whether SE is used with 2nd person only, 1st and 2nd person, or none of the two specifications; (ii) whether SE is the only form or whether it alternates with prototypical 1st and 2nd person plural reflexives (1PL mos and 2PL vos), and (iii) whether the first person plural reflexive mos can be 'doubled' by SE (mo(s) se). The data indicate that SE can be the result of processes in different components of grammar: in phonology, as the result of a reduction operation, in morphology as the result of the elimination of a person feature, or in the lexicon as a feature bundle that fully lacks person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of on-going research, this paper explores the pedagogical implications of contrastive analyses of multiword units in English and Spanish based on electronic corpora as a CALL resource. The main tenets of collocations from a contrastive perspective - and the points of contact and departure between both languages - are discussed prior to examining the commonest types of verb+noun combinations as a significant case of so-called 'de-lexicalized', 'light', 'empty', 'thin', 'stretched' or 'support verbs'. A qualitatively and quantitatively-oriented case study is accordingly conducted, determining the weight of dar in support verb constructions within the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) and of the English equivalent stretched verb constructions with give within the British National Corpus (BNC). Based on the empirical data obtained in this way, this paper provides relevant insights for more accurate translations, helping to enhance the collocational competence of L2 students, who tend to avoid constructions including empty verbs like give in favour of full-verb forms. The detailed findings in this paper come to shed light on the potential of CALL resources for improving the collocational usage of foreign-language learners, as quantitative and qualitative comparisons of collocations based on electronic corpora serve to highlight the similarities and, more importantly, the lexical and typological differences between both languages, thereby substantiating the invaluable role that corpus analysis may play for language teaching in general and for collocational knowledge and proficiency in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista EntreLínguas is the property of Revista EntreLinguas 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.)

English vague language (VL), as in general noun phrases, general extenders and general verbs, is central to casual conversation. It can have discourse functions and create an informality and solidarity. The rationale for the study described here was a gap in the literature vis-à-vis language learner metapragmatic awareness of VL in their L1. It was hypothesised that attitudes towards VL vary from language to language. This paper describes a comparative questionnaire study of German, Spanish and Mandarin speakers' attitudes to VL in their languages. Subjects were invited to translate English VL to their languages and to think of other vague forms: German speakers volunteered 'Dingsbums' and 'und so'; Spanish speakers suggested 'cómo se llame' and 'o algo así; Mandarin speakers noted 'na ge dong xi'. Subjects were also asked to describe social variables, domains and functions associated with their VL: German speakers saw VL as creating closeness but many felt that it made addressors sound unreliable and mildly impolite; Spanish speakers mostly saw VL as a way of showing a relaxed, close, comfortable, friendly, but a few saw it as an sign of laziness and impoliteness; Mandarin speakers responded that VL was a marker of friendly informality and solidarity but they mostly associated it with indifference, laziness, impatience, irritation, anger, disappointment, contempt and dishonesty. The paper concludes with suggestions of ways to incorporate tasks on VL into English language teaching classrooms, and to raise language teachers' awareness of English L2 users' beliefs and intercultural differences in terms of VL. • Vague language forms, functions and variation. • Close with family and friends. • Indifference, impoliteness with strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides their common lexical reading, the Spanish verbs amenazar ‘threaten’ and prometer ‘promise’ can also yield a modal reading. The shift from the former reading to the latter implies a change from a control structure to a raising structure and involves grammaticalization, more specifically auxiliation, which ends up in a layered co-existence of the two (or more) constructions. This paper is mainly concerned with the syntactic and semantic categorization of the grammaticalized quasi-modals amenazar and prometer. Generative accounts have focused on the difference between raising and control, but have not addressed the differences between the two verbs. This paper highlights that modal amenazar faces less constraints than modal prometer . Furthermore, the account presented below will show that epistemic and evidential auxiliaries have scope over the qualification expressed by modal amenazar and prometer, and are therefore not to be called “epistemic”. The paper also deals with the tense restrictions that these verbs undergo. Tenses such as the present perfect are not available in modal constructions with amenazar and prometer because of the activation of agentive patterns inherent to the lexical semantics of the verbs in question. The tense criterion is valid for verbs for which the grammaticalized form is not the most frequent one, but it does not account for true modals in Spanish and other Romance languages. The infinitive criterion turns out to be a good alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, our aim is to present the results of our researchs about the anaphoric accusative object in the Spanish variety of Madrid and in the Brazilian Portuguese variety of São Paulo and to propose a theoretical analysis to these constructions based on minimalist developments (CHOMSKY, 1999, 2000, 2004). Interviews of the Spanish variety of Madrid (CESTERO MANCERA et al. 2014) and Brazilian Portuguese variety of São Paulo (LIMA-HERNANDES; VICENTE, 2012) were analysed. Regarding the theoretical approach, the biological (CHOMSKY, 1981, 1986) and social (LABOV, 2008; WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2009) perspectives on language were combined. We observed the effect of the antecedent referenciality, of the determinant indefinite features, of the bare nouns, of the structure and lexical aspect of verbs on possibility of elipsis in the Spanish variety of Madrid. Concerning the Brazilian Portuguese variety of São Paulo, the null objects were almost categorical and the lexical pronoun presented restrictions to less referencial antecedents. These results ressemble the tendencies of our previous research (SIMÕES, 2015) and the Spanish varieties of País Vasco (LANDA, 1993) and Quito (SUÑER; YÉPEZ, 1988). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In French and Spanish, both parts of the causative–anticausative alternation can be formally encoded in two ways: Depending on the form of the verb, marked and unmarked causatives and marked and unmarked anticausatives can be distinguished. The goal of this paper is to verify whether causalness is a factor in the encoding and whether the two languages differ in this respect (verbs used more often as causatives than as anticausatives have a high degree of causalness, while verbs used more often as anticausatives than as causatives have a low degree of causalness). On the basis of a corpus study of 20 French and 20 Spanish verbs, it will be shown that in both languages a strong correlation between causalness and encoding exists. A high degree of causalness increases the likelihood that a verb’s anticausative is marked and the causative is unmarked, and a low degree of causalness increases the likelihood that a verb’s anticausative is unmarked and the causative is marked. [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.)

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.)

Aspectual notions, although displayed most clearly in verbs, manifest across categories, with notions like (un)boundedness manifesting themselves in several instantiations which are sometimes specific of individual grammatical categories. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how aspectual notions emerge in different categorial domains by an analysis of subject-experiencer and object-experiencer psychological predicates (SEPVs and OEPVs, respectively). We review the evidence that SEPVs denote individual level (IL) states, and provide new facts - taken from the behaviour of participles - in favour of that diagnostic; we also argue that OEPVs should be classified as states of the stage level (SL) class. We argue that OEPVs denote states with an onset, which corresponds to the denotation of SLs. SEPVs simply denote states without boundaries, which we argue to correspond to IL predicates. Finally, we show how these two denotations follow without further assumptions from the structures proposed for SEPVs and OEPVs in previous work, specially Pesetsky (1995), making it unnecessary to postulate that the distinction is of lexical nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that so-called subextraction (e.g., Whoi has John seen a picture of ti?; cf. Corver 2006 for recent discussion) does not involve movement of a whphrase to a DP internal escape hatch position before reaching the CP layer. Instead, we claim that apparently subextracted wh-phrases are actually direct dependents of the verb after a process of reanalysis (or readjustment; cf. Chomsky 1977, Kayne 2002) applies. Our proposal rethinks an old (Bach & Horn 1976) idea, reframes it in modern terms and argues against the cyclic status of DPs (cf. Bruening 2009, Leu 2008, Ott 2008, and references therein), by leaning on new evidence from Spanish. The non-cyclic status of DPs is a fairly standard idea ever since clausal properties were assumed to hold for nominal domains (cf. Chomsky 1970, Brame 1982, Abney 1987, and much subsequent literature). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the ingredients of a Romance construction, henceforth named the V ben V construction, consisting of a verb and its theme object in combination with a degree adverb ben '{well, really}' followed by a verb in past participle or an adjectival form. It describes the properties and restrictions of the various constituents involved in this construction, and it presents a new analysis focusing on the properties of the main predicate, the theme object, the degree adverb ben and the degree phrase ben+VPP/A. It accounts for the potential manner and result readings of the adjunct constituent that ben introduces (i) by postulating that the ben+VPP/A modifier always predicates of the (sub)event expressed by the verb (an activity or a change of state), (ii) by associating manner with a DO verbal layer, and result with a BECOME verbal layer, and (iii) by identifying different ASPectual structures in the complement position of the degree adverb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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