Volume 29, Issue 1 -

Many varieties of Romance show more than one intonation contour available for polar question (PQ) marking. Understanding the pragmatic licensing conditions for these contours is no easy task. Experimental work has tended to account for the variation in terms of dichotomies like information-seeking vs. confirmation-seeking or neutral vs. biased . In this paper I use production data to argue that different languages and dialects will encode different types of information intonationally in PQs, but that the type of information that we find encoded through intonation is quite similar to the type of information encoded through sentence-final particles in languages like Cantonese or Lao. These meanings lie on an epistemic gradient, and the points on the gradient that are encoded linguistically through intonation are language-specific (i.e. language X encodes meaning A, but language Y might encode meaning B, or meanings A & B, etc.). I explore three contours in Puerto Rican Spanish, their phonetic implementations, and their meanings with respect to this epistemic gradient. I argue that we should keep in mind the range of possible meanings of SFPs in other languages in order to refine our methodology in a way that allows us to make better predictions about the pragmatic division of labor among intonation contours, specifically for PQs.

In this paper, the properties of Spanish DPs including a possessive pronoun and a relative clause are thoroughly described and analyzed. Adopting a raising analysis for both prenominal possessives and restrictive relatives, it is claimed that the incompatibility of a determiner possessive and a restrictive relative in current standard Spanish is due to the violation of an interpretive constraint sanctioning subextraction from [Spec, CP]. It is further proposed that, in constructions in which a possessive pronoun does combine with a relative clause, the possessive is not subextracted from [Spec, CP]. It is finally shown that this proposal accounts for different well-formed dialectal and Old Spanish patterns with a prenominal possessive and a restrictive relative and also applies to data from other Romance languages.

This article discusses four properties of Spanish aspectual se constructions. 1. The telicity inducing effects of se ; 2. The ungrammaticality of bare noun direct objects; 3. Leísta Spanish Person Case Constraint (PCC) repairs; and 4. A central/terminal coincidence relation between the direct object and the subject. I show that aspectual se does not induce telicity with stative VPs. The ungrammaticality of bare noun direct objects results from the direct object functioning as an ‘inner subject’ of a complex predicate formed by the verb and a null preposition, the complement of which is a pro coreferential with the external argument. The semantics of the null P plus verb give rise to a central/terminal coincidence relation between the direct object and the complement of P. Moreover, I argue that the null pro moves to Spec, Appl and functions as an indirect object. In this respect, aspectual se is an indirect object reflexive. The resulting structure, moreover, is fundamentally a double object construction, a construction in which PCC effects are known to hold.

Majorcan Catalan postverbal pronominal elements are typically described as being prominent due to stress shift from their host. This study sheds light on the prosodic phonology of these pronouns through the analysis of duration, vowel quality, and f 0 in verb+pronominal sequences, which are compared to a baseline condition without pronominals and to the same sequences in a Catalan variety without stress shift. Our results show acoustic differences in the realization of pronominals in these varieties. The duration and vowel quality patterns are consistent with the stress shift account of postverbal pronominals in Majorcan Catalan. Analysis of f 0 contours also reveals phonological differences across varieties. Whereas stressed postverbal pronominals are not rare in Romance, Majorcan Catalan is one of a much reduced number of varieties within the Romance domain, where the attachment of a pronominal element to a host triggers “true” stress shift rather than an additional prominence on the pronominal element, like Sardinian or Neapolitan.

In this study, the intonation of one-word imperatives is compared with that of one-word declaratives in Peninsular Spanish in order to establish differences and similarities between them. The analysis of 373 utterances produced by 8 speakers (117 in a declarative context and 256 in an imperative context) demonstrates that the intonational link between declaratives and imperatives is irrefutable since L+H* L% configurations are found in both pragmatic contexts. Nevertheless, imperatives can also show tonal movements not found in declaratives: L+H* LH%, L+H* HL%, L+H* H%, L* H%. Finally, the study demonstrates that due to the limitations short imperative utterances involve, speakers implement tonal movements rarely attested in imperatives with multiple pitch accents.

This study investigates two apparently distinct morphological processes that occur in some specific Vernacular Central Catalan clitic clusters: Fission and Impoverishment. In Fission, a cluster of first and second person clitics (e. g. te me ) generates a third clitic in the sequence (e. g. se te me ), while Impoverishment involves the replacement of the first or second person reflexive clitic in the cluster by the default reflexive: e. g. te me becoming se te . It is argued that Fission and Impoverishment are, in fact, successive stages of the same morphological phenomenon, which is referred to as Reflexivity Cluster Remapping. Assuming the framework of Distributed Morphology for pronoun paradigms, the various constraints that govern and limit Reflexivity Cluster Remapping are explored.