The semantics of Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets
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Bruno Estigarribia
Abstract
Rioplatense Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets contain a left-dislocated direct object DP, an in situ direct object epithet DP, and a direct object clitic, all three apparently referring to the same event participant. Previous proposals have focused on syntactic licensing mechanisms but how the epithet’s meaning is integrated in the sentence has not been addressed. We assume a multi-propositional framework to first show that these sentences encode two propositions, one at-issue (asserted) and one not-at-issue (non-asserted). The content of the epithet is absent from the at-issue proposition and is interpreted as a main semantic predicate in the not-at-issue proposition. Furthermore, we argue that this not-at-issue predication is best understood as a conventional implicature. Second, the epithet has been assumed to (unproblematically) pick up the left-dislocated DP as subject of predication. However, with quantified DPs and in intensional contexts the subject of predication may be different from the left-dislocated DP. The behavior of the epithet in these cases is shown to be similar to the behavior of pronouns in intersentential anaphora, thus suggesting that the syntax of this construction is underlyingly biclausal.
Acknowledgments
The author would gratefully like to acknowledge Patrícia Amaral, Itamar Francez, Luis López, Liliana Sánchez, Judith Tonhauser, and audiences at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2015 and the VII Encuentro de Gramática Generativa (EGG7) for helpful discussion, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their help in clarifying and tightening the argumentation in this paper.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Structural autonomy and aspectual import: A new(er) Spanish Progressive
- Spanish stress and lexical accent across syntactic categories
- The semantics of Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets
- Negative concord in Quebec French
- Agreement and interpretation of partitive constructions in Spanish: The dual nature of nominal features
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Structural autonomy and aspectual import: A new(er) Spanish Progressive
- Spanish stress and lexical accent across syntactic categories
- The semantics of Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets
- Negative concord in Quebec French
- Agreement and interpretation of partitive constructions in Spanish: The dual nature of nominal features
