Volume 19, Issue 2

Judeo-Spanish denotes those varieties of Spanish preserved by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and have emigrated throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. This paper analyzes several types of sonorant consonant metathesis in Judeo-Spanish within the framework of Optimality Theory. Following Holt's (2004) account of Old Spanish, local metathesis of dl , dn , and nr clusters is analyzed as a repair strategy for bad syllable contact. A novel analysis is proposed in which nasal place assimilation and positional faithfulness constraints account for the failure of dm metathesis in morphologically derived environments. Judeo-Spanish also has two types of innovative rhotic metathesis that cannot be explained in terms of syllable contact. The rd > dr shift is analyzed as an effect of the Obligatory Contour Principle, whereby adjacent segments identical in place, manner, and voicing specifications are prohibited. The second type involves the displacement of r toward the left edge of a word, also frequently attested in popular Modern Spanish. A comprehensive account of rhotic metathesis is developed, following recent work on position-specific constraint evaluation (Riggle and Wilson 2005) and segmental adjacency constraints (Carpenter 2002).

Romanian participates in the so-called dative alternation, offering four syntactic types of ditransitive sentences. On the one hand, it exhibits two types of double object constructions (DOCs) corresponding to English Jane sends Bill a letter . In one of them, the goal corresponding to Bill is a morphological dative, and in the other it follows the preposition la . On the other hand, Romanian also exhibits two types of prepositional ditransitive constructions (PDCs) corresponding to English Jane sends a letter to Bill , with a goal that can be a morphological dative or follow the preposition la . Such Romanian ditransitive sentences correspond to DOCs when they contain a dative clitic, and to PDCs when they contain a goal and show no dative clitic. It is proposed that Romanian DOCs and PDCs have different syntactic structures. DOCs contain a low Applicative Phrase with the dative clitic as head, the goal as specifier, and the theme as complement. Thus, in DOCs the goal c-commands the theme. By contrast, in PDCs the theme is the specifier of a PP that c-commands the goal as the complement of P. Due to these different hierarchical structures, DOCs and PDCs contrast in behavior concerning binding, frozen scope, and weak crossover relations between goal and theme.

It has been noticed that indefinite descriptions with the Spanish determiner unos (plural-“one”) have a group denotation (Villalta 1994). That meaning has been explained within DRT (Laca and Tasmowski 1996, Gutiérrez Rexach 2001). Unos introduces a group referent variable in the discourse, which is associated to an atomic condition and does not trigger box-splitting (Gutiérrez Rexach 2001). However, the group interpretation is unstable, and there are cases in which unos -DPs may have an individual reading too. We suggest that instability is best understood as an epistemic fact. Unos is not a semantic determiner of the plural noun that follows it but it is composed with a covert group-denoting noun, which restricts the variable domain to sets of groups. The plural noun denotes the member's class and is related to the covert group term through a group-constitute function (Barker 1992). The group interpretation is unstable because it relies on our implicit knowledge of a covert group-denoting nominal head. The variability in the group interpretation also shows the role of perception in processing groups. We propose an explanation of the instability of unos in terms of Kratzer's version of a Skolem Choice Function. Unos denotes a Perspectival Choice Function that combines with a predicate denoting a set of groups and returns a unique group. We use the perspectival argument to represent the holder of the beliefs from which the implicit meaning is inferred. When the perspectival argument is underspecified, the unos -phrase denotes a fuzzy group, which we dub a cluster. When it is anchored to the speaker, the content of the cluster becomes transparent and the distributive reading of the group may arise. We extend the Spanish case to Galician and Catalan.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified account of the behavior of wh-in-situ questions in Spanish (i.e., non-neutral word order and the Sentence Final Requirement). The analysis presented argues that phonological properties govern the distribution of in-situ wh-phrases. More precisely, in-situ whphrases in Spanish need to appear last within their intonational phrase. Following insights from Stjepanović (1999, 2003) on the interaction between stress assignment (Zubizarreta 1998) and the Copy Theory of movement (Chomsky 1993), I argue that in-situ wh-phrases need to appear in final position to receive main stress via the Nuclear Stress Rule. I show that in-situ wh-phrases are spell-outs of lower copies. This analysis captures the behavior of all in-situ wh-phrases in Spanish.