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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
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.10poo
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