On the grammaticality of recomplementation in Spanish
In English, an overt secondary complementizer has been described as a grammatical violation, a claim that cannot be corroborated for Spanish. The present study fills this gap in the literature by asking whether the overt variety is associated with a decrement in acceptability judgment when compared to the null variety. Results from a speeded aural acceptability judgment task suggest that there is indeed a significant decrement in acceptability rating. This finding is robust across both statement and question constructions. A processing-based account is offered in order to unify results from both Spanish and English. Importantly, given that the native Spanish speakers do not fully reject the overt variety, the proposed account is meant to complement rather than to replace existing grammar-based accounts.
References (28)
References
Brovetto, C. (2002). Spanish clauses without complementizer. In T. Satterfield, C. Tortora, & D. Cresti (Eds.), Current issues in Romance languages: Selected Proceedings from the 29th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL-29). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Casasanto, L., & Sag, I. (2008). The advantage of the ungrammatical. In Proceedings of the
30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
, Austin, TX.
Cuza, A., & Frank, J. (2015). On the role of experience and age-related effects: Evidence from the Spanish CP. Second Language Research, 31(1), 3–28.
Cuza, A., & Frank, J. (2011). Transfer effects at the syntax-semantics interface: The case of double-que questions in heritage Spanish. The Heritage Language Journal, 8(2), 66–89.
Demonte, V., & Fernández-Soriano, O. (2009). Force and finiteness in the Spanish complementizer system. Probus, 21(1), 23–49.
Etxepare, R. (2010). From hearsay evidentiality to samesaying relations. Lingua, 120(3), 604–627.
Ferreira, F., Lau, E.F., & Bailey, K.G. (2004). Disfluencies, language comprehension, and tree adjoining grammars. Cognitive Science, 28(5), 721–749.
Flege, J.E., MacKay, I.R., & Piske, T. (2002). Assessing bilingual dominance. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23(4), 567–598.
Fontana, J.M. (1993). Phrase structure and the syntax of clitics in the history of Spanish. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.
Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O’Neil (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95–126). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68(1), 1–76.
González i Planas, F. (2014). On quotative recomplementation: Between pragmatics and morphosyntax. Lingua, 146, 39–74.
Lahiri, U. (2002). Questions and answers in embedded context. Oxford: OUP.
MacIntyre, P.D., Noels, K.A., & Clément, R. (1997). Biases in self‐ratings of second language proficiency: The role of language anxiety. Language learning, 47(2), 265–287.
Martín-González, J. (2002). The syntax of sentential negation in Spanish. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Harvard University.
Paoli, S. (2007). The fine structure of the left periphery: COMPs and subjects: evidence from Romance. Lingua, 117(6), 1057–79.
Plann, S. (1982). Indirect questions in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 13(2), 297–312.
Rivero, M. (1994). On indirect questions, commands, and Spanish quotative que
. Linguistic Inquiry, 25(3), 547–554.
Rivero, M. (1980). On left-dislocation and topicalization in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 11, 363–395.
Rizzi, L. (2013). Notes on cartography and further explanation. Probus, 25(1), 197- 226.
Rizzi, L. (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In L. Haegeman (Ed.), Elements of grammar (pp. 281–337). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Shameem, N. (1998). Validating self-reported language proficiency by testing performance in an immigrant community: The Wellington Indo-Fijians. Language Testing, 15(1), 86–108.
Suñer, M. (1993). About indirect questions and semi-questions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16(1), 45–77.
Uriagereka, J. (1995). An F position in Western Romance. In Katalin E. Kiss (Ed.), Oxford studies in comparative syntax: Discourse configurational languages (pp. 153–75). Oxford: OUP.
Villa-García, J. (2012a). Characterizing medial and low complementizers in Spanish: Recomplementation que and ‘jussive/optative’ que
. In M. González-Rivera & S. Sessarego (Eds.), Current formal aspects of Spanish syntax and semantics (pp. 198–228). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Villa-García, J. (2012b). Recomplementation and locality of movement in Spanish. Probus, 24(2), 257–314
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
VILLA-GARCÍA, JULIO & DENNIS OTT
2024.
Recomplementation as a paratactic phenomenon: Evidence from Spanish and English.
Journal of Linguistics 60:1
► pp. 213 ff.
Suárez-Büdenbender, Eva-María
2020.
Alejandro Cuza (ed.). Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact,
and Change.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13:1
► pp. 247 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 september 2024. 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.