Cover not available
Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 191–210

Focus and the syntacticization of discourse

| Newcastle University
This paper examines two pairs of phenomena: Quantifier Fronting in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish (Mackenzie 2010; Leonetti and Escandell-Vidal 2009) and declarative verb-clitic orders in Old Spanish and ‘Conservative’ Asturian (Fontana 1993; Fernández Rubiera 2009). While the syntax of each construction does not change diachronically, the information-structure interpretation does. The medieval constructions both exhibit wide focus, but the modern counterparts exhibit verum focus. I argue that this change is the result of a ‘syntacticization of discourse’, in which the syntactic mechanism for left-peripheral displacement changes from a formal EPP feature to information-structure specific syntactic features (e.g., [+focus]) as a consequence of changes to the locus of EPP and Tense features (Biberauer and Roberts 2010; Poole 2014).
Keywords: Asturian, EPP, feature inheritance, information structure, Spanish, verum focus, Wide focus
Published online: 8 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.10poo
References (39)
References
Batllori, Monserrat, and Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz. 2013. “Emphatic Polarity Particles in Spanish and Catalan.” Lingua 128: 9–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Batllori, Monserrat and Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz. 2015. “Weak Focus and Polarity: Asymmetries Between Spanish and Catalan”. In Syntax Over Time: Lexical, Morphological and Information-Structure Interactions, ed. by Theresa Biberauer and George Walkden, 280–298. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Batllori, Monserrat, and Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz. no date. Pre-review version of Batllori and Hernanz 2015. Available at [URL]. [Accessed: 08/01/16]
Benincà, Paola. 1994. “Osservazioni sulla sintassi dei testi di Lio Mazor.” In La variazione sintattica: studi di dialettologia romanza, ed. by Paola Benincà, 163–176. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Biberauer, Theresa, and Ian Roberts 2010. “Subjects, Tense and Verb-movement.” In Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory, ed. by T. Biberauer et al., 263–303. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2002-. Corpus del Español (100 million words, 1200s-1900s). Available online at [URL]
d’Andrés Díaz, Ramón. 1993. Allugamientu de los Pronomes Átonos col Verbu n’Asturianu. (Colección Series Minor 2). Uviéu: Departamentu de Filoloxía Española, Universidá d’Uviéu.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 2007. Information Structure: The Syntax-Discourse Interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Escandell-Vidal, Victoria and Manuel Leonetti. 2011. “On the Rigidity of Procedural Meaning”. In Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, ed. by Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti and Aoife Ahern, 81–102. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández Rubiera, Francisco. 2006-2008. “Another Look at the [+finite] Subordinate Context in Western Iberian Romance.” Revista de Filoloxía Asturiana 6/7/8: 289–309.Google Scholar
. 2009. Clitics at the Edge: Clitic Placement in Western Iberian Romance Languages, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University.Google Scholar
. 2010. “Forceo, Finitenesso and the Placement of Clitics in Western Iberian Romance Languages.” Estudios de lingüística galega 2: 75–95.Google Scholar
Fontana, Josep M. 1993. Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in the History of Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane and Virginia Hill. 2011. “The Syntacticization of Discourse.” paper presented at ONLI Belfast.
Hernanz, Maria-Lluïsa. 2006. “Emphatic Polarity and C in Spanish.” In Studies in Spanish Syntax, ed. by L. Brugè, 105–150. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina.Google Scholar
Hinterhölzl, Roland and Svetlana Petrova. 2009. “From V1 to V2 in West Germanic.” Lingua 120: 315–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jasinskaja, Katja. 2014. “Information Structure in Slavic.” In Handbook of Information Structure, ed. by Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kotcheva, Kristina et al. 2014. “A Diachronic Perspective on V1 in Icelandic.” Ms. University of Konstanz.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2007. “Basic Notions of Information Structure.” In The Notions of Information Structure, ed. by Caroline Féry, Gisbert Fanselow and Manfred Krifka, 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.Google Scholar
Kuno, Susumo. 1972. “Functional Sentence Perspective.” Linguistic Inquiry 3 (3): 269–320.Google Scholar
Laka, Itziar. 1990. Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of Functional Categories and Projections. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Leonetti, Manuel and Victoria Escandell-Vidal. 2009. “Fronting and Verum Focus in Spanish.” In Focus and Background in Romance Languages, ed. by Andreas Dufter and Daniel Jacob, 155–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mackenzie, Ian. 2010. “Refining the V2 Hypothesis for Old Spanish.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 87 (4): 379–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poole, Geoffrey. 2007. “Interpolation and the Left Periphery in Old Spanish.” In Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 13, ed. by Miri Hussein, Marina Kolokante and Clare Wright. Newcastle University: Newcastle upon Tyne: School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics.Google Scholar
. 2011. “Focus and the Development of N-words in Spanish”. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2009: Selected Papers from "Going Romance" Nice 2009 , ed. by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Tobias Scheer, 291–304. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
. 2013. “Interpolation, Verb-second, and the Low Left Periphery in Old Spanish”. Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 5 (1): 69–95.Google Scholar
. 2014. “Feature Inheritance in Old Spanish: (re)visiting V2”, paper presented at the 2014 Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain , 1-5 September, Oxford University.
Quer, Josep. 2002. “Edging Quantifiers. On QP-fronting in Western Romance.” In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000 [ Current Issues in Linguistics 232 ], ed. by C. Beyssade, R. Bok-Bennema, F. Drijkoningen and P. Monachesi, 253–270. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi 1997. “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.” In Elements of Grammar, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281–337. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 1992. “A Theory of Focus Interpretation.” Natural Language Semantics 1 (1): 75–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salvi, Giampaolo. 2012. “On the Nature of the V2 System of Medieval Romance.” In Functional heads: the cartography of syntactic structures, volume 7, ed. by Laura Brugé et al., 103–111. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sheehan, Michelle. 2010. “‘Free’ inversion in Romance and the Null Subject Parameter”. In Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory, ed. by Theresa Biberauer et al., 231–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sitaridou, Ioanna. 2011. “Word Order and Information Structure in Old Spanish.” Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10: 159–184.Google Scholar
2012. “A Comparative Study of Word Order in Old Romance.” Folia Linguistica 46 (2): 553–604. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vallduví, Enric, and Elisabet Engdahl. 1996. “The Linguistic Realization of Information Packaging.” Linguistics 34: 459–519. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Viejo Fernández, Xulio. 2008. Pensar asturiano. Ensayos programáticos de sintaxis asturiana. Uviéu: Trabe.Google Scholar
Watanabe, Akira. 2004. “The Genesis of Negative Concord: Syntax and Morphology of Negative Doubling.” Linguistic Inquiry 35 (4): 559–612. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber. 1993. “Linguistic Form and Relevance.” Lingua 90: 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zagona, Karen. 2002. The Syntax of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Rossi, Silvia & Cecilia Poletto
2022. Bare quantifiers and Verb Second. In Language Change at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 275], ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 july 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.