On the Contrasts Between sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish and the Structure of the Complementizer Phrase Domain
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Julio Villa-García
Abstract
This paper aims to account for a host of old and novel syntactic contrasts between the emphatic polarity particle sí ‘yes’ and its putative counterpart with an instance of the complementizer que –sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish. Even though the two constructions appear to be synonymous in certain contexts, closer inspection reveals that the two elements display a number of non-trivial asymmetries in their behavior and distribution and convey different meanings. We thus argue that the two elements should be treated differently. Building on Hernanz (2007 and subsequent work), we propose that sí, which marks focal positive polarity, i.e., verum focus, originates in ΣP and then moves to FocusP. By contrast, sí que is directly merged in a projection below TopicP but higher than FocusP in the left periphery, does not encode polarity, and instead renders the meaning that the speaker is extremely confident about the propositional content, be it positive or negative. We argue that sí que involves more CP structure than sí, which makes a variety of correct empirical predictions.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank two anonymous SHLL reviewers as well as a number of anonymous conference abstract reviewers for their data and detailed and useful comments. We are also grateful to the audiences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Complutense University of Madrid, University of Vienna, University of Geneva, and University of Manchester, especially to Montserrat Batllori, Delia Bentley, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Giuliano Bocci, Silvio Cruschina, Simone De Cia, Antonio Fábregas, Martina Faller, Luis García Fernández, Vera Hohaus, Maria Llüisa Hernanz Carbó, Aritz Irurtzun, Maribel Jimeno Panés, Anna Kocher, Susana Lorenzo-Zamorano, Jonathan MacDonald, John Payne, Eva-Maria Remberger, Luigi Rizzi, Hugo Sánchez-Llana, Daniel Vergara, and Susi Wurmbrand.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Nominal predication with estar
- A distinctness approach to clitic combinations in Romance
- Mirativity as Expressive Meaning: The Case of adiós
- The Internal Structure of Perfective Adjectives: States and Blocking
- L2 Acquisition of Spanish VOT by English-Speaking Immigrants in Spain
- The Use of the Glottal Stop as a Variant of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish
- On the Gradient Lenition of Spanish Voiced Obstruents: A Look at Onset Clusters
- On the Contrasts Between sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish and the Structure of the Complementizer Phrase Domain
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Nominal predication with estar
- A distinctness approach to clitic combinations in Romance
- Mirativity as Expressive Meaning: The Case of adiós
- The Internal Structure of Perfective Adjectives: States and Blocking
- L2 Acquisition of Spanish VOT by English-Speaking Immigrants in Spain
- The Use of the Glottal Stop as a Variant of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish
- On the Gradient Lenition of Spanish Voiced Obstruents: A Look at Onset Clusters
- On the Contrasts Between sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish and the Structure of the Complementizer Phrase Domain
