This paper is a study of the adverbial modifier bien and its use as an elative or operator of extreme degree in a Caribbean Spanish variety, Puerto Rican Spanish. It is argued that there are several properties setting the elative interpretation of bien apart from other well-known uses in other… read more
The expression of extremeness in Puerto Rican Spanish is encoded in a series of modifiers, which are attached to adjectival, nominal or verbal elements. The proper treatment of this phenomenon requires a generalization of gradability and modification transcategorially. A semantic account is… read more
Pragmatic competence includes the capacity to express illocutionary force and successfully achieve perlocutionary effects, in order to guarantee fully functional communication exchanges. Alzheimer’s Disease is characterized by a constellation of limitations derived from progressive cognitive… read more
Spanish predicative verbless clauses, in which noun phrases display predicative content, are of interest for the study of the left periphery because they systematically involve displacement to this region of the clause. After considering several previous analyses, it is proposed that Spanish… read more
The possibility of preposing a degree delimiter before a negative term is a well-known feature of Caribbean Spanish in general. We present a detailed empirical analysis of the Puerto Rican case and we show that this possibility is due to a combination of syntactic and semantic factors that pertain… read more