Volume 9, Issue 1 -

Verbs of creation such as write and paint , in English and in other languages, occur in two distinct types of sentences: transitive or intransitive ( The teacher wrote the letter/The teacher wrote (a lot) and The artist painted a picture/The artist painted (a lot) ). In this paper, we provide an analysis of such syntactic alternation, drawing on data from Brazilian Portuguese. We argue that this syntactic phenomenon is triggered by a semantic process of polysemy, and not by an argument alternation, as is assumed by some authors. We show evidence to support our proposal, namely, the distinct aspectual interpretations of the different sentences with verbs of creation, the distinct prefixation with re - in the transitive and intransitive forms, and the polysemy found in the nominalizations of the analyzed verbs. In order to formalize our semantic account, we propose a type of representation, a predicate decomposition structure enriched by a simple truth-conditional semantics of the root.

Pronominal verbs (PVs) are a morphological form class of intransitive verbs in Spanish such as acatarrar-se (= to get a cold) and quejar-se (= to complain) that are obligatorily marked with the reflexive, or se , clitic. The main objective of this paper is to propose a solution to the following puzzle: PVs represent a heterogeneous set of argument structure configurations but are formally marked in the same way. In order to do so, I empirically motivate the existence of two different argument structure configurations within the class of PVs, unaccusative and unergative. I then show that what makes these configurations unique is that they contain a deficiency in Voice, in the form of unchecked formal features. This deficiency has a different source in each configuration: it is an unchecked categorial D-feature in unaccusatives and unvalued phi-features in unergatives. The reason why these two configurations are marked in the same way is because, as proposed in Pujalte and Saab (2012, Syncretism as PF-repair: The case of se-insertation in Spanish. In Maria C. Cuervo & Yves Roberge (eds.), The end of argument structure? 229–260. Bingley, UK: Emerald Press.), the se clitic paradigm is used as a general repair mechanism to eliminate unchecked D and phi features on Voice post-syntactically.

This paper puts forward an analysis of cliticization within the framework of phases (cf. Chomsky 2000 et seq .). In particular, it is argued that object clitics in Romance A-move as XPs to the v*P phase edge, adhering to standard locality constraints (the Phase Impenetrability Condition). The proposal is explored in the context of clitic climbing (and “restructuring”), which is related here to the existence of defective domains where the relevant Probe (v*) fails to assign Case to the Goal (the clitic). Finally, the possibility that semantic effects are associated to climbing (cf. Uriagereka 2002) is also considered, in line with the interpretation triggered by displacement processes of the object shift sort (cf. Chomsky 2001).

The – udo past participle, once common for second conjugation verbs in Castilian Spanish, disappeared completely by the fifteenth century, having been replaced by the – ido participle form of the third conjugation. In this study, I consider several of the factors proposed to have contributed to the sudden disuse of – udo by analyzing participle use in a corpus from the thirteenth century, which coincided with the height of the variation between the old form in – udo and the new one in – ido . Through the use of this corpus, titled Prose Works of Alfonso X el Sabio (Gago Jover 2011, Prose works of Alfonso X el Sabio , Digital library of Old Spanish texts . Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Retrieved from http://www.hispanicseminary.org/t&c/ac/index-en.htm, accessed 29 September 2012), I show that not all verbs of this time period were affected by the change in the same way. That is to say that certain verbs significantly favored either the form in – udo or that in – ido within these texts. I also analyze patterns of participle use within each text of the corpus demonstrating that certain texts showed significantly more – udo forms while others showed significantly more – ido ones. I conclude this study by showing that within a group of linguistically similar texts, stronger relationships between verb type and participle use appear.

The present study is concerned with language contact between Creole English and Spanish spoken by bilingual West Indians living in Panama City, Panama. The goal is to examine the speech patterns of monolinguals of Creole English and Spanish and Creole English-Spanish bilinguals by employing the comparative variationist method. A series of statistical comparisons of the factors contributing to voice onset time (VOT) of the voiceless coronal plosive /t/ in four varieties were carried out to address phonetic permeability due to contact. These comparisons reveal evidence of different types of contact-induced outcomes among bilinguals. When speaking Spanish, convergence, which is the result of direct transfer from Creole English, is apparent in terms of rate of speech. When speaking Creole English, there is also evidence of convergence, particularly in the preceding segment variable. Furthermore, the comparisons reveal processes of indirect transfer from Spanish, such as simplification in terms of following vowel height, and the creation of alternations in terms of phone position and syllable stress. These contact-induced changes are interpreted as evidence that bilingual West Indians are resisting influence from a more dominant Mestizo culture, and are creating West Indian norms. It is proposed that this community is in the initial stages of developing new emerging varieties.

The subjects of unaccusative verbs of change of location (e. g., llegar, venir ) may appear in pre-verbal and post-verbal position. However, most syntactic accounts of word order in Spanish suggest that VS is the canonical order for these verbs. This claim has been supported by some experimental data, but further insight on the mechanisms underlying this particular instance of variation can still be gained from its study from a variationist, corpus-based perspective. We investigate the SV-VS alternation in the spontaneous oral discourse of two populations, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City and Spanish-English bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona. Multivariate analyses reveal that the informative load of the subject, the animacy of the subject, verbal tense and aspect, and the presence or absence of an initial modifier, in this order, condition word order selection. The results also show that bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona are less flexible than monolinguals speakers in assigning word order to unaccusative verbs of change of location when the subject does not introduce new information, favoring SV almost categorically. A possible cause for this dissimilar behavior is the influence of English, where unaccusative verbs tend to appear pre-verbally, on the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Resumen La denominada concordancia ad sensum es uno de los fenómenos más llamativos en español y otras lenguas. En este trabajo nos proponemos demostrar que este tipo de concordancia puede explicarse por medio de mecanismos vinculados con los mismos factores que intervienen en la concordancia general, i. e., la estructura sintáctica y las operaciones morfológicas. Nuestra investigación se enmarca en el modelo de la Morfología Distribuida (Halle y Marantz 1993) y busca dar cuenta de las concordancias alternantes y del bloqueo de tal alternancia en determinados contextos, a partir de un análisis detallado de la estructura del Sintagma de Determinante y de los rasgos involucrados en las proyecciones funcionales del ámbito nominal.

One of the more characteristic features of Spanish is the process of articulatory reduction, known as spirantization, which affects the voiced stops /b,d,g/ resulting in the voiced approximants [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞]. While studies have shown variation with respect to the phonetic environments in which /b,d,g/ undergo spirantization, the general consensus has been that they are always realized as approximants between vowels in most varieties of Spanish. Likewise, several studies have found that spirantization relates to different social factors in different varieties of Spanish. However, these studies have been impressionistic and/or qualitative in their analyses of the voiced obstruents and have not examined the varying degrees to which intervocalic /b,d,g/ spirantize. The current study analyzes more than 4,500 tokens of intervocalic /b,d,g/ from the spontaneous speech of 31 speakers from the province of Concepción, Chile. Likewise, the present paper examines and compares the phonetic behavior of traditional intervocalic /b,d,g/ with that of /b,d,g/ in non-traditional intervocalic contexts created by /s/ elision. Results indicated that both linguistic and social factors had an influence on the degree to which speakers realized [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞], and that while speakers still lenite and delete /b,d,g/ in non-traditional intervocalic environments created by /s/ elision, generally they do so at a much lower rate than when in traditional intervocalic contexts.