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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]

This paper provides an analysis of transparent gerunds in Spanish, as in ¿Qué llegó [silbando ] Juan? 'What arrived [whistling ] Juan?', using a decomposition of Aktionsart in a series of syntactic heads. A traditional analysis of these secondary predicates as adjuncts would undermine well-established syntactic principles restricting movement and extraction. We argue that these transparent gerunds should be analyzed as syntactic constituents merged as part of the syntactic projections associated with Aktionsart. More precisely, they qualify as RhemePs - assuming Ramchand's First Phase Syntax system - thus allowing their arguments to be extracted. Well-attested differences between Spanish and English gerunds will be explained in our analysis by proposing that the Spanish gerund projects as PathP (given it carries a path preposition), whereas English gerunds are simply RhemeP (lacking any sort of preposition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. Some, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. The present paper contributes to this debate by experimentally testing the realization of presentational focus in Mexican Spanish using an acceptability judgment task. The results of the experiment reveal that, for these speakers, focused constituents need not be rightmost and can in fact be stressed in non-final position, contra the consensus view. These findings expand the database on focus in Spanish and indicate that theories of the prosody/syntax interface may need to be revised, especially those theories that motivate discourse-related syntactic movement based on the requirements of the prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that unspecified objects in sentences such as Maria leyo anoche (= Maria read (something) last night) should be represented as null incorporated nouns in l-syntax (Hale & Keyser 1993, 2002). Specifically, the material understood as 'something' is a null bare N that incorporates into the verb 'read,' forming an endocentric compound meaning 'THING-read.' While the general idea underlying such a hypothesis is not new (Mateu 2012; Marti 2011; Zubizarreta & Oh 2007), the analysis outlined here provides the first explicit formalization of it in such a way that can account for a wide range of properties (some not yet described in the literature) that are intimately related to what can be broadly defined as 'noun incorporation constructions' cross-linguistically. Like certain types of noun incorporation constructions in other languages, unspecified object constructions have the following properties: (i) they are restricted lexically (in this case to 'activity'/'manner' verbs), (ii) the verb+unspecified object may have a conventionalized interpretation, (iii) unspecified objects are indefinite and take obligatory narrow scope with respect to all other operators, (iv) unspecified objects may be modified 'externally' by a limited set of adjectives (v) the verb+unspecified object gives rise to an atelic reading. All of these properties are shown to derive from the fact that unspecified objects are null incorporated nouns. This is desirable since the same set of properties are shared by different types of noun incorporation constructions in languages outside Romance and, to a large extent, by bare noun constructions in Spanish and other Romance languages (Espinal & McNally 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of ditransitivity is explored at the lexical, syntactic and surface levels. By focusing on several types of ditransitive sentences in Spanish it is revealed that there is a triple dissociation between these levels. First, it is shown that the availability of a ditransitive structure (syntactic level) for a certain verb does not depend on the verb being ditransitive (lexical level). Second, causative structures with dative arguments are shown to be ditransitive at the surface level, but not to have an underlying ditransitive structure. Finally, cases of unaccusative sentences with dative arguments are analysed as instances of ditransitive structures without lexical or surface ditransitivity. The paper argues that ditransitivity is at best a pre-theoretical, descriptive notion, and that ditransitive verbs in fact belong to Levin's (Papers from The Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 35: 223-247, 1999) non-core transitives: ditransitives are just transitives compatible with taking a relation between two individuals as complement. This analysis accounts for the intralinguistic and crosslinguistic variation in the expression of the relation, both in terms of type (two DPs related by a transitive preposition or an applicative head) and number of objects realized or omitted. Although the idea that there is no syntactic ditransitivity - that is, that no single verbal head can take two complements - has been implicit in most generative work of the last two decades, it has not been directly explored. This investigation leads to the conclusion that a syntactic property, binary branching, is at the basis of the impossibility of syntactic and lexical ditransitivity. Thus, this result suggests that syntax restricts not only possible structures but possible lexical meanings as well. [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]

This paper investigates the phonetics and phonology of initial peaks and final falls in wh-questions produced by speakers of the variety of Spanish spoken in the Castile-La Mancha (Manchego) region of Spain. The acoustic analysis is based on speech data for nine speakers, and the goal is to identify how utterance-initial and utterance-final F 0 gestures relate to broader issues in intonational phonology and the prosodic signaling of wh-questions. The findings for left periphery constituents provide evidence for a H tone at the utterance boundary for all speakers, although the exact autosegmental representation cannot be provided due to variability in peak alignment patterns. The findings for right periphery constituents indicate two distinct speaker groups based on nuclear syllable and posttonic gestures. Specifically, the continuum of final falls is motivated by contrasting bitonal nuclear pitch accent configurations: H + L* vs. ¡L + H*. The boundary L% specification is argued for all speakers in spite of seemingly divergent posttonic gestures. The experimental findings speak to cross-linguistic issues such as prominence marking in wh-question intonation, the syntax-prosody interface in wh-questions, and the internal structure of pitch accent configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is abundant research that deals with diathesis alternations, such as the locative alternation (LA), because they can give us information about the interface between syntax and the lexicon. However, the literature dealing with the LA has frequently ignored the relation that exists between the crosslinguistically reduced set of prepositions that can occur in such construction. This paper postulates that the prepositions involved in the LA have either a locative or a possessive meaning, providing evidence from the comparison of Spanish and English, inter alia. These prepositions share a common underlying structure and are related by means of a simple derivation, following Freeze's (Language 68: 553-595, 1992) account of locative and possessive predication. This prepositional phrase will occupy the lower XP position in a construction with unaccusative properties D [V [XP]]], as developed in Zubizarreta & Oh (On the syntactic composition of manner and motion, linguistic inquiry monograph, MIT Press, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis for the use of the clitic se in transitive constructions, as in Juan se leyó un libro 'John se read a book'. It argues that se is an underspecified eventive verbal head which takes a bounded path as a complement. In the transitive construction, se first merges with a verb that provides the manner description for the event that se introduces. The direct object then serves as the path complement. This analysis of se is then extended to anticausative and inchoative uses of se, as in La comida se enfrió 'the food cooled down' and Juan se durmió 'John fell asleep'. Here, se does not merge with a verb but merges directly with an acategorial Root, and the Root provides the path complement. This study further supports the notion that scalar structure is important to understanding the relationship between argument structure, event structure, and syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the information structure of VP-anaphora constructions in English, Spanish, and German. The goal is to provide an initial account of the syntactic and prosodic licensing mechanisms of VP-anaphora and to suggest some theoretical consequences for the syntactic representation of the different types of focus and topic. Recent studies (e.g. Rooth 1992b; Tomioka 1995; Fox 1998) have proposed that the characteristic feature of VP-anaphora constructions is that they bear contrastive focus on the remaining subject. We argue against this claim by providing evidence from prosodic and syntactic investigations of the remaining elements. Our hypothesis is that presentational focus in VP-anaphora is realized on the negative/affirmative expression and that the remaining constituent is free to take various discourse Junctions depending on the context and the type of construction in which the VP-anaphora occurs. Our main empirical argument against the above claim comes from Spanish, where the remaining constituent can never be interpreted as a contrastive focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]