Cover not available
Part of
Variation within and across Romance Languages: Selected papers from the 41st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Ottawa, 5–7 May 2011
Edited by Marie-Hélène Côté and Eric Mathieu
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 333] 2014
► pp. 119–132

Weight effects across verbal domains

The case of Spanish subjects

| University of Alabama at Birmingham
| University of Missouri-Columbia
Abundant research reports that weight affects the position of postverbal constituents (Hawkins 2004; Wasow 1997, 2002; Wasow & Arnold 2003). Weight has been analyzed both as a constraint on production and processing. Our study analyzes whether increasing weight can shift subject position, which is typically preverbal, to the postverbal domain. We focus on Spanish subjects with unaccusative and emission verbs, because they display similar percentages of preverbal and postverbal occurrences. Our sample corpus was extracted from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). Data was coded as nominal and scalar data in order to compare the validity of the different methodologies adopted by Hawkins (1994) and Gries (2003) respectively. In addition, we investigate which is the most descriptive weight unit: word (Lohse, Hawkins & Wasow 2004), syllable (Gries 2003), or phoneme. Our results indicate that weight is a statistically significant factor in subject placement.
Published online: 17 December 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.333.09her
References
Burzio, Luigi
1981 Intransitive Verbs and Italian Auxiliaries. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
1986 Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Ping
1986 “Discourse and Particle Movement in English”. Studies in Language 10.79–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
1975 The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dowty, David
1991 “Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection”. Language 67.547–619. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan T.
1999 “Particle Movement: A cognitive and functional approach”. Cognitive Linguistics 10.105–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A study of particle placement. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A.
1994 A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2000 “The Relative Order of Prepositional Phrases in English: Going beyond manner–place–time”. Language Variation and Change 11.231–266.Google Scholar
2004 Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 “Language Universals and the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis”. Language Universals ed. by Morten H. Christiansen, Christopher Collins & Shimon Edelman, 54–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lipski, John M.
1977 “Preposed Subjects in Questions: Some considerations”. Hispania 60:1.61–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lohse, Barbara, John A. Hawkins & Thomas A. Wasow
2004 “Domain Minimization in English Verb-Particle Constructions”. Language 80.238–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mayoral Hernández, Roberto
2007 “A Variation Study of Verb Types and Subject Position: Verbs of light and sound emission”. Romance Linguistics 2006: Selected papers from the 36th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) ed. by José Camacho, Nydia Flores-Ferrán, Liliana Sánchez, Viviane Déprez & María José Cabrera, 213–226. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “A Typological Approach to the Ordering of Adverbials: Weight, argumenthood and EPP”. A New Relay on Linguistics ed. by Asier Alcázar, Irene Barberia, Rebeka Campos Astorkiza & Susana Huidobro. Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca Julio de Urquijo 39:2.141–159. Universidad del País Vasco.Google Scholar
Mayoral Hernández, Roberto & Asier Alcázar
2011 “A Study of Weight and Subject Position in Spanish”. Rasegna Italiana de Linguistica Applicata, Anno XLIII 1–2.355–366.Google Scholar
Mcdonald, Janet L., J. Kathryn Bock & Michael Kelly
1993 “Word and World Order: Semantic, phonological, and metrical determinants of serial position”. Cognitive Psychology 25.188–230. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mendikoetxea, Amaya
2000 “Construcciones inacusativas y pasivas”. Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española ed. by Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte, vol. II, 1575–1629. Madrid: Espasa.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, David
1978 “Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis”. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 4.157–189.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana
1980 “Deletion and Disambiguation in Puerto Rican Spanish”. Language 56.371–385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prince, Ellen F.
1981 “Toward a Taxonomy of Given-New Information”. Radical Pragmatics ed. by Peter Cole, 223–256. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Real Academia Española, Banco de datos (CREA) online
Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. [[URL]].
Rosenbach, Anette
2005 “Animacy Versus Weight as Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English”. Language 81.613–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
1994 Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sorace, Antonella
2000 “Gradients in Auxiliary Selection with Intransitive Verbs”. Language 76.859–890. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A.
1990 “Information Flow and Dative Shift in English Discourse”. Development and Diversity: Language variation across time and space ed. by Jerold A. Edmondson, Crawford Feagin & Peter Mühlhäusler, 239–253. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas at Arlington.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas A.
1997 “Remarks on Grammatical Weight”. Language Variation and Change 9.81–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 Postverbal Behavior. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas A. & Jennifer Arnold
2003 “Post-Verbal Constituent Ordering in English”. Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English ed. by Günter Rohdenburg & Britta Mondorf, 119–154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro & Rosti Vana
2022. Tracking subject position change in U.S. Southwest Spanish: what 19th and 20th century Tucson newspapers tell us. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:2 ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.