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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 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]

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]

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]

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 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 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 is based on the idea that the study of peripheral phenomena or marginalia in language can shed new light on the interpretation of other, less marginal linguistic data. Specifically, it focuses on the joining or separation of linguistic elements, which is often considered a typically marginal phenomenon, but which constitutes one of the syntactic criteria for classifying verbal periphrases. For this purpose, interpolation, i.e. the separation of the two components of a periphrasis by another element, is examined in three specific cases: , and . The analysis offers clues for reconsidering interpolation as a criterion for the classification of periphrases. At the same time, the study makes it clear that, on the one hand, verbal periphrases are characterised by a type of syntactic ambiguity and, on the other hand, their semantic value is decisive in determining their periphrastic nature. [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]

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]

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]

In this paper, I will pay attention to the behavior of adjectives such as altísimo and torpe, called ambivalent (Luján 1981) or underspecified (Fernández Leborans 1995), due to the fact that they can be combined with both the copulative verb ser and the copulative verb estar in languages such as Spanish. More specifically, I am interested in two structures, both of them dependent on the Spanish verb of perception ver. In the first, altísimo and torpe combine with the copula estar in infinitive clauses. In the second, subordinate infinitive clauses are headed by the copula ser. I will try to elucidate which is the contribution of the copulative verbs to the interpretation of these structures. With Escandell-Vidal (2018), I assume that the adjectives altísimo and torpe in combination with estar give rise to an evidential effect: the spatio-temporal situation to which the property they denote is anchored is conceived as a situation of visual experience. In the first of the structures I am interested in, the source of information is likewise encoded in the verb of perception. Therefore, the research question that will guide this study is whether the evidential content is actually being expressed twice. [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 the recent literature, it is widely assumed that adjectival passives are stative, while verbal passives are eventive. Regarding Spanish, it is also mostly assumed that adjectival passives only come with estar (El edificio está bien construido, «The building is well built»), while verbal passives only come with ser (El edificio ya ha sido construido, «The building has already been built»). However, there is at least a group of verbs, that of subject experiencer psych verbs (SPEVs), which poses a serious problem to these generalizations, given that passives of SEPVs, although being unquestionably stative, are constructed with ser: Pedro es temido, «Pedro is feared». In this paper it is argued, that SEPV passives are not verbal, but adjectival, and that they take ser because they denote individual-level states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the description of the verb soleo, the Latin cognate of the Spanish auxiliary soler, with the aim of contributing to the explanation of the Spanish lexical periphrasis soler + INF, when considering it from a diachronic perspective. Soleo is an especial verb whose singularity is manifested in its etymology and its grammatical particularities. Concerning its etymology, two hypotheses have been considered which start from two different Aktionsart stems: one makes it derive from a Proto-Indo-European iterative stem, the other from a stative one. From this second etymological hypothesis, soleo could be included among Latin denominative stative *ē-presents with the basic meaning of 'to be of oneself, to have as one's own, to be normal, to be custom'. Regarding its morphosyntactic features, the semi-deponent soleo has a morphologically passive perfect stem, solitus sum, whose use with aoristic value comes into contradiction with the morphological restriction of the Spanish auxiliary soler and with the aspectual categorization of habitual auxiliary attributed to it. Together with the function as an auxiliary verb constituting a periphrasis with an infinitive, it also presents a use as a full lexical verb in which the prototypical semantic value of its etymology emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the diatopic variation of the periphrasis andar + GER, comparing its use in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. To this end, the relative frequency of the construction is analyzed in several corpora, as well as its most distinctive semantic and syntactic features. Our quantitative analysis shows, on the one hand, the high frequency of andar + GER in Mexican Spanish as compared to Peninsular Spanish. On the other hand, it reveals that the periphrasis occurs, above all, in informal language modalities. Semantically, the present study corroborates that, in periphrases with a gerund, the verb andar ('to walk'), has progressively lost its lexical meaning of physical movement and has come to transmit pragmatic values, particularly of determination and insistence. In addition, unlike Peninsular Spanish, in Mexican Spanish the periphrasis is less subject to selectional restrictions with respect to the gerund, a relatively recent change that points to a strong grammaticalization. Syntactically, the grammaticalization process is reflected in the adjacency of the auxiliary and the gerund, the fixed internal order of the two components of the periphrasis, clitic climbing and a drop in the frequency of coordinated gerunds. The case of andar + GER demonstrates that grammaticalization of the same construction can take place in different ways depending on the specific dialectal environment. Likewise, and at a more general level, it stresses the importance of a diatopic approach in studies on verbal periphrases and grammaticalization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent work that argues in favor of a return to movement analyses for clitics (Uriagereka & Raposo 2005, Boeckx & Gallego , Roberts , ; Gallego), this paper explains why object clitics need to engage in probe/goal relations with agreeing verbs to value their Case features. A Case‐based account within Phase Theory (cf. Chomsky , ,) allows us to account for previously difficult to explain intervention and other displacement effects associated with these elements, and it also predicts clitic placement in a wide variety of ECM and causative constructions. Clitics in these constructions are sensitive to the timing and location of Case‐assigning mechanisms on the finite embedding verb, highlighting the importance of Case theory in deriving 'raising to object' phenomena in Spanish. [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]

This paper examines backgrounding strategies for human agents in Catalan Sign Language, that is, constructions featuring human agents that are non-referential. We identify and analyze four types of agent-backgrounding strategies: subjectless constructions, indefinite pronouns, the impersonal axis, and general nouns. Extending on previous work, we offer a description and a semantico-pragmatic analysis of each construction. [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]

This paper studies the disjoint reference effect in passive constructions with ser and estar 'to be', which consists in the impossibility of having a reflexive reading. I show, based on an empirical study undertaken with speakers of Peninsular Spanish, that said effect holds in passives with ser, but not with estar. I develop a theoretical proposal to account for the data. My study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the properties of passive participles with ser and estar in Spanish, as well as to the current study of verbal and adjectival passives in other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual modifiers that have adverbial and adjectival counterparts are an important source of information for researching lexical aspect in the nominal domain. One class of such modifiers are adverbs of completeness (completamente 'completely', totalmente 'totally'), which are maximizers when modify adjectives, and their correspondent adjectives (completo 'complete', total 'total'). This paper addresses the inheritance of aspectual features and its relation to degree in event nominalizations of incremental theme verbs (traduccción 'translation', destrucción 'destruction') through the analysis of the modification performed by adjectives of completeness in Spanish. The proposal combines a syntactic account of deverbal nominalizations with a scalar approach to aspect. Adjectives of completeness are argued to be aspectual modifiers, with a contribution equivalent to that of their adverbial counterparts both in the verbal and in the adjectival domain, establishing thus a parallelism between degree modification of adjectives, verbs and nominals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article presents a corpus-based study of two near-synonymous verbs in Spanish: the locative verbs of putting poner and meter. Starting from the universal principle of linguistic economy, the paper aims to empirically identify potentially influencing variables that determine the native speaker’s choice between the two verbs. It is investigated whether and to what extent the choice is governed by a set of variables related to the nature of the locative movement itself and the characteristics of the participants taking part in the event. The difference between the near-synonyms is shown to be determined mainly by the direction of the locative movement, the semantic nature of the participants (animacy, concreteness), the reflexiveness of the event, as well as the cognitive construal of the locative event (the possibility of a container-reading). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has long been characterized by its openness towards contributions from other fields. However, it has remained virtually uninformed by neuroscience. Such a disconnection has become all the more unfortunate since SFL ventured into the cognitive domain (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Opening a new avenue of disciplinary interaction for SFL, this paper reviews experimental studies on the neurocognitive basis of processes and verbs of doing, highlighting their manifold implications for the theory. Available data corroborates the SFL assumptions that these processes and verbs are (i) conceptually different from participants and nouns, (ii) functionally distinguishable from other process and verb types, and (iii) non-arbitrarily related to each other. Moreover, the evidence shows that (at least some of) the conceptual distinctions within semantics are naturally grounded in more basic (motor and perceptual) neurocognitive distinctions. This, we propose, calls for an elaboration of the stratified SFL model via the inclusion of a sensorimotor stratum. More generally, the article seeks to foster an empirically sound and theoretically relevant dialogue between SFL and promising approaches within cognitive neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on expressions of age combined with the verbs ser and estar in the Spanish of Guatemala and Mexico. It analyses the linguistic and extralinguistic factors favoring the extension of estar and the process of linguistic change involved in the expression of age in the two dialectal groups. Based on the analysis of three linguistic corpora from these communities (one from Ciudad de México and two from Guatemala), the results show, on the one hand, that estar is the most frequent copulative form, and, on the other, that some age-related adjectives favor the extension of the copulative form: chico, chiquito, grande. The paper concludes that age expressions with ser and estar are a feature of dialectal differentiation and, at the same time, an evolution of estar at the expense of ser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we will account for the semantic composition of a productive class of predicates in Mexican Spanish formed by lexical verbs that combine with a defective morphosyntactic clitic. Our analysis is that le corresponds to a lexical affix that is syntactically analysed as a defective High Appl head that selects for intransitive roots or intransitivized verbal bases, and projects a LeP. Semantically, le encodes an intensive meaning and imposes certain restrictions on the specific event schemas denoted by the V it may combine with. We show that le modifies the selected event by classifying it as an Action; and, in addition, the whole modified event may intersectively combine with a locus or goal property denoted by an external locative or oblique topic adjunct. Le is not an argument of the predicate, and therefore can be associated neither with a referential nor with a coreferential interpretation, but is not expletive either. This paper is relevant for showing how morphosyntax feeds semantics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]

A vast amount of research has been carried out inspired by the motion event typology established by Talmy (1985, 2000), that of, verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. However, hardly any research has been devoted to either deeply analyse motion verb lexicons or to explore manner-of-motion verb granularity between languages typologically different or similar (cf. Slobin, 2003, 2006). This paper concentrates on an important subdomain of motion, i.e., human locomotion, and examines the way Spanish and English lexicalise it in verbs. The first part of the paper focuses on the semantics of human locomotion verbs with special attention to the sort of fine-grained manner information that each language encodes. In the second part, an empirical study on how Spanish and English monolinguals categorise human locomotion verbs into three motor pattern categories (Walk -- Run -- Jump) is reported. [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 presents a quantitative and qualitative study of the relationship between discourse positions and pragmatic functions of the Spanish discourse markers derived from motion verbs, namely anda , vamos , vaya and venga . These discourse markers are highly polyfunctional and concurrently have a high degree of positional freedom. The results show, first, that the position of a discourse marker and the discourse unit in which the marker is inserted restrict or activate its pragmatic functions. More particularly, discourse markers with an expressive, conative or discourse structuring function present a more increased pragmatic scope than those with a textual function operating at a more profound level of the discourse. Second, the degree of distributional freedom is related to the potential semantic-pragmatic autonomy of the discourse markers, rather than to the degree of functional diversity. In other words, discourse markers that do not necessarily depend on other discourse units (within the same turn) to convey their communicative intentions show a higher degree of positional freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to bring to light, unravel and interpret some of the ideas of Rudolf Lenz (1920) concerning verbal categorization in historiographical perspective. As a starting point, we examine Lenz's position with regard to the sentence as a fundamental linguistic unit and as a framework in which the relationships between its components take place. The work subsequently focuses on verbal categories (parts of speech or word classes) and analyzes in an interpretative and critical perspective the three alternative and complementary systems of verbal categories proposed by Lenz applying alternative defining criteria: formal, logico-semantical and functional, the latter being prioritary for Lenz. Finally, it presents a summary of the three systems of Lenz confronted with each other and with the system of ten parts of speech in traditional grammar, and it assesses Lenz's significant contribution. [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]

Using the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual Corpus, the present paper examines the variable position of the 1sg Spanish subject pronoun yo—pre- versus post-verbal—to consider the effect that code-switching may have on structural change. In an analysis of close to 700 tokens of yo, a rate of 16% post-positioning is found, which is within the range of post-position in non-contact varieties and thus contraindicative of the convergence hypothesis, in accordance with which the almost exclusive use of preverbal subject pronouns in English would predict lower rates of post-verbal yo in a converged contact variety. Moreover, by testing factors hypothesized to account for choice of post-posing yo using multivariate analysis, it is shown that bilinguals display similar constraints on yo post-positioning in New Mexican Spanish as monolingual speakers of Spanish, providing stronger support for an anti-convergence account. Results are discussed in terms of bilingual parallel activation, syntactic priming, and construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spanish, several constituents have their unmarked position after the sentence's main verb (direct objects, locative adjuncts, depictives, etc.). The linearity of linguistic expressions implies that if two such postverbal constituents appear in a given sentence they must be ordered in a certain way. The present paper examines information focus and syntactic weight as possible factors in postverbal constituent order. Based on data from two experimental studies it will be shown that (i) these factors indeed play a role in postverbal constituent order in Spanish and that (ii) postverbal constituent order is characterized at the same time by optionality and preferences (e.g., although a direct object (dO) and a depictive (DEP) can be ordered as DEP-dO or dO-DEP, the order dO-DEP is clearly preferred over DEP-dO). To account for the optionality and preferences, the data will be modeled in a (simplified) Stochastic Optimality Theory grammar without assuming a basic constituent order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

For many instances of verb-object combinations involving change of state verbs, different kinds of internal arguments seem to trigger distinct interpretations of the verb phrase. These are usually divided into literal uses, such as romper la ventana ‘break the window’ or cortar el papel ‘cut the paper’ and figurative uses such as romper el desarrollo ‘interrupt the development’ or cortar la circulación ‘cut off the circulation’. Based on an extensive manual annotation of corpus (the used corpus is the El País Corpus consisting of all the El País newspaper issues from 1976 to 2007 and is hosted at the Insitut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada (IULA) at the University Pompeu Fabra) data involving verb-object combinations with Spanish change of state verbs, I argue that combinations like romper el desarrollo or cortar la circulación , far from representing frozen idiom chunks, exemplify very productive compositional patterns. The frequency and naturalness with which change of state verbs take both physical and abstract entities as objects raises the question of how verbs express their meaning and makes this kind of data especially relevant for a theory of the lexicon as well as of composition. I provide a clear inventory of the typical combinatorial patterns of romper and cortar and I show that their combinatorial behaviour is much more diverse than usually acknowledged. I then argue that these facts need to be addressed by the compositional system, rather than by postulating homophonic lexical entires (Dowty, 1979; Alonso Ramos, 2011) or contextualist accounts (Recanati, 2005). For a proposal I turn to Modern Type Theories, which allow me to incorporate a richer notion of lexical semantics within compositional semantics. These theories thus allow me provide an insightful compositional account of what has long been considered non-compositional, namely combinations of change of state verbs with objects denoting abstract entities. [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 investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer “to seem/to appear” in different tenses, with and without experiencers, and with Tense Phrase (TP), verb phrase (vP) and Adjectival Phrase (AP) complements. The results show that advanced L2 learners can perform just like native Spanish speakers regarding grammatical knowledge in this domain, although the subtle differences between both languages are not explicitly taught. We argue that these results support Full Access approaches to Universal Grammar (UG) in L2 acquisition, by providing evidence that uninterpretable syntactic features can be learned in adult L2, even when such features are not directly instantiated in the same grammatical domain in the L1 grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States and null transition processes are the two types of events that are excluded from the infinitive clauses embedded to the Spanish verb ver, 'to see'. The reason is that none of them provide changes of properties or locations that can be perceived. This is the lexical requirement that the visual perception verb imposes to its complements. In this paper, they are examined the conditions under which certain null transition processes can appear in non-epistemic or direct perception contexts: (a) the existence of external boundaries; (b) the inexistence of presupposed states related to the asserted states; and (c) the possibility that null transition (macro)processes are analyzed in terms of non-null transition (micro)processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to compare a few selected connectors which introduce different types of subordinate clauses in Spanish (conjunction -- que, pronoun -- que and adverb -- donde) and their equivalents in Polish. We also looked at a few examples of the compound sentences in Polish and tried to indicate the Spanish equivalents of the conjunctions which were used in these sentences (such as że, który, gdzie). We tried to observe the differences in the number of the exponents of these relations of subordination and their functions in two languages in question and the influence of the verb (its modal and temporal characteristics) on the use of these conjunctions. In the final part we mentioned some tendencies in creating subordinate clauses with these conjunctions, pronouns and adverbs in the spoken language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the topic of retention in structural and semantic change. While much of the literature on grammaticalization has focused on uncovering the remnants of semantic nuances of lexical items contained in autonomous structures, recent proposals have argued for a parallel effect related to structural conditions. To address this issue, I survey the distribution of hacer 'to do/make'; + time constructions in Spanish used with either a punctual or durative meaning. Using a quantitative analysis of corpus data from spoken Spanish, I argue that hacer + time exhibits both (i) a general leveling across the constructional paradigm resulting in structural and semantic neutralization and (ii) retention of clausal features associated with the source construction, particularly with low-frequency collocates (e.g., hacía). The result of this process of grammaticalization is a type of syntactic 'blend' that expresses features both of a verb and an adjunctival element. The nature of this particular instance of structural and semantic change is argued to be distinct from cases discussed previously in the literature in that the hacer + time construction does not exhibit the same degree of structural autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of bare nominals unmarked for number (BNs) occurring in object position in Spanish and Catalan, on which the BN is a syntactic complement to the verb, but not a semantic argument. After describing the properties that distinguish BNs from other indefinite expressions (bare plurals, indefinite singulars preceded by un ‘a’, and bare mass terms), we argue that these BNs occur in a monadic syntactic configuration in the sense of Hale & Keyser (1998), that they denote first-order properties, and that they are combined with the verb via a modified version of Dayal's (2003) semantics for pseudo-incorporation. Specifically, the proposal consists of a lexical rule that generates the class of verbs that productively accept BN objects, plus a composition rule that treats the BN as modifier of the verb. We point out the advantages of this analysis over three other well-known semantic analyses for combining verbs with property-type nominals. Finally, we show how the analysis can be naturally extended to existential sentences, which combine with BNs although, prima facie, they do not appear to meet the lexical conditions for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes three studies on verb production and argument structure in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) using different methodologies. The first is an observational study which uses a spontaneous-talk longitudinal sample. The second uses an experimental sentence naming task as a result of event video observation. The third comprises an experimental sentence naming task with static images that differ in verb argument complexity. Although the specific data vary according to the methodology used, there is clear evidence that Catalan and Spanish speaking children with SLI have special difficulties in producing verbs with a highly complex argument structure and make errors in the specification of obligatory arguments. It is concluded that both processing limitations and deficits in the semantic representation of verbs may play a role in these difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how syntactic knowledge interfaces with other cognitive systems by analysing the production of postverbal subjects, V(erb)-S(ubject) order, in an L1 Spanish-L2 English corpus and a comparable English native corpus. VS order in both native and L2 English is shown to be constrained by properties operating at three interfaces: (i) LEXICON-SYNTAX: the verb is unaccusative (Unaccusative Hypothesis); (ii) SYNTAX-DISCOURSE: the subject is focus (End-Focus Principle) and (iii) SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY: the subject is heavy (End-Weight Principle). We show that, since learners produce VS under the same interface conditions as native speakers, unaccusativity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for VS production. However, learners overproduce VS and make persistent errors in their syntactic encoding. Our findings support recent proposals that these difficulties stem from problems at coordinating syntactic knowledge with knowledge from other external systems, but they suggest that the nature of such difficulties is not external to the syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper proposes a new analysis of Spanish verb forms. It works from a general assumption in the Spanish literature that the Spanish verb consists of a root followed by a verb theme marker; these are followed by tense/aspect/mood and finally by person/number. While this structure is often transparent, there are cases where it is unclear, leading to a variety of previous analyses. Problematic cases are accounted for here without violating this order of morphemes. The proposal is compared with the classical analysis by Harris and with a recent one by Arregi. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper argues that the difference between connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in specificational copular sentences is heavily influenced by semantics and information structure. It shows that anti-connectivity effects with respect to binding disappear when the influence of information structure is neutralized, whereas anti-connectivity effects with respect to scope result from the semantics of specificational sentences. These data lead to the conclusion that anti-connectivity effects cannot be used as evidence against a syntax-based approach to specificational sentences and binding, that the analysis of specificational sentences should include both a syntactic and a semantic device, and that the syntactic analysis of specificational sentences should rely crucially on their information structure. I present and adopt Heycock & Kroch's (2002) analysis for specificational sentences, in which connectivity effects result from the assembling of ground and focus. The fact that connectivity effects are also exhibited by verb-object-subject word order in French and Spanish, which is marked for the ground-focus partition, is presented as an important piece of independent evidence in favor of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]