Volume 29, Issue 2 -

The current study analyzes distributional frequencies of the Spanish Progressive construction ( ESTAR +Gerund) in a corpus of late-twentieth-century conversational speech in order to assess changes in structure and meaning. The analysis incorporates structural priming as a measure of analyzability and autonomy and utilizes both lexical and contextual measures of aspect to assess the construction’s preferred environment relative to its competing gram: the simple Present. Results of a multivariate analysis ( N =1,017) indicate that over the last 100 years, the construction has lost analyzability, further coalescing into a single grammatical unit. This new unit has also acquired the ability to express limited duration (progressive, continuous) aspect with stative as well as dynamic verbs, indicating the consolidation of the construction’s aspectual import. At the same time, its presence in extended duration contexts is attributed to strong effects of Progressive-Progressive priming and, to a lesser extent, licensing by a co-occurring temporal adverbial. By situating these results within the construction’s diachrony, it is concluded that the increased grammaticalization of the Spanish Progressive in the twentieth century, as assessed quantitatively, is markedly distinct from previous centuries.

In this paper, I provide an analysis of Spanish stress with the following three characteristics: (a) both verbal and non-verbal stress are accounted for in a single, unified, system, (b) the three-syllable window for stress is accounted for in a principled way, and (c) the stress algorithm has no access to the morphosyntactic structure. I do this by extending Roca’s analysis of variable edge parameters for stress in Spanish non-verbs to verbs, and by arguing that morphemes which mark for only person, number, and gender (φ-features) are outside of the domain of stress because they are prosodic adjuncts.

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.

It is argued that there are two types of asymmetric negative concord languages: in languages like Spanish and Italian, negative concord results from a purely formal agreement relation between the negation and a negative concord item. In Quebec French, in addition to this purely formal licensing, there is a negative dependency relation between both items, which form two segments of a discontinuous negative quantifier. This accounts for the following differences. While Spanish, Italian and Quebec French reject negative concord between a subject negative expression and the negation, in Quebec French, negative concord with the negation becomes possible when the clause contains a postverbal negative expression in addition to a preverbal one. Moreover, in Quebec French, but not in Spanish or Italian, negative concord is blocked across a quantifier meaning almost .

This paper analyzes the role of the interaction between syntax and semantics in determining the mixed agreement patterns shown by Spanish partitive constructions when they appear as subjects. These patterns follow straightforwardly from the dual nature of nominal features (concord and index features organized in bundles) and from the assumption that Agree is a feature-valuation process in which the unvalued features of a Probe seek matching parallel valued features of a Goal under locality constraints and a maximization principle. After discussing previous approaches and justifying our syntactic analysis, we demonstrate that interaction for agreement between syntax and semantics is articulated via the nominal index features of the head nouns in the partitive structure, so singular and plural agreement, linked to the valuation/non-valuation of the number index feature, correlates with a group/atomic entity vs. a plurality/distributive reading, respectively, the meaning of the verbal predicate also being relevant. The empirical basis for this analysis is provided by a corpus search whose results are carefully described in the paper.