Interpolation, verb-second, and the low left periphery in Old Spanish
Keywords:
interpolation, Old Spanish, focus, G-Topic, information structure, Formal Movement, verb-secondAbstract
Interpolation is a phenomenon of a number of (chiefly Medieval) Romance varieties in which direct and indirect object pronouns may be separated from the finite verb by elements such as negation, adverbs, subjects and prepositional phrases. This paper considers both their information structure and syntax using data from the Corpus del Español (Davies 2002-). I first argue that, contra a number of analyses, interpolation is not a process of focalization. Rather, many interpolated elements are a G-Topic in the sense of Bianchi & Frascarelli (2010); in other words, a familiar or given topic. This information structure account suggests that interpolation targets a functional category in the low left periphery, and this is confirmed by a number of distributional facts: interpolation appears to target a position lower than various high topic positions, but higher than the TP domain. However, some interpolated elements (particularly sentential negation) are less plausibly analysed as topics, and I suggest that these elements are positioned in the low left periphery by ‘Formal Movement’ (Frey 2004, 2006), a semantically and pragmatically vacuous operation which attracts the element at the left edge of the TP domain in order to satisfy a verb-second requirement.
Downloads
References
Alexiadou, Artemis & Elena Anagnostopoulou. 1998. Parametrizing Agr: word order, v-movement and EPP-checking. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 16, 491-539.
Battlori, Montse, Carlos Sánchez & Avel·lina Suñer. 1995. The incidence of inter- polation on the word order of Romance languages. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 4 no. 2. Departament de Filologia Catalan/Departament de Filo- logia Espanyola, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 185–209. [20 October 2012]
Bianci, Valentina & Mara Frascarelli. 2010. Is ‘topic’ a root phenomenon? Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 43–88. <http://www.siff.us.es/ iberia/index.php/ij/index> [20 October 2012]
Butt, John & Carmen Benjamin. 2000. A Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, 3rd edition. London: Arnold.
Campos, Héctor & Fernando Martínez-Gil (eds.). 1992. Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Chereny, W. H. 1905. Object pronouns in dependent clauses: a study in Old Span- ish word-order, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 20, 1-151.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-linguistic Perspec- tive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Contreras, Heles. 1991. On the position of subjects. In Susan Rothstein (ed.), Per- spectives on Phrase Structure: Heads and Licensing (Syntax and Semantics 25). New York: Academic Press, 63-79.
Davies, Mark. 2002. Corpus del Español (100 million words, 1200s-1900s). Available online at <http://www.corpusdelespanol.org >
Demonte, Violeta & Olga Fernández-Soriano. 2009. Force and finiteness in the Spanish complementizer system, Probus 21(1), 23-49.
Fernández Ordóñez, Inés. 2008-2009. Orden de palabras, tópicos y focos en la prosa alfonsí. Alcanate VI, 139-172. Fischer, Susann. 2003. Rethinking the Tobler-Mussafia Law: data from Old Catalan, Diachronica 20, 259-288.
Fontana, Josep M. 1993. Phrase structure and the syntax of clitics in the history of Span- ish. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Fontana, Josep M. 1996. Phonology and syntax in the Tobler-Mussafia Law. In Aaron
Halpern & Arnold Zwicky (eds.), Approaching Second: Second Position Clitics and Related Phenomena. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 41-83. Fontana, Josep M. 1997. On the integration of second position phenomena. In van Kemenade & Vincent (eds.), 207-250.
Frascarelli, Mara & Roland Hinterhölzl. 2007. Types of topics in German and Italian. In Susanne Winkler & Kerstin Schwabe (eds.), On Information Structure, Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 87-116.
Frey, Werner. 2004. The grammar-pragmatics interface and the German prefield. Sprache & Pragmatik 52, 1–39.
Frey, Werner. 2006. Contrast and movement to the German prefield. In Valéria Molnar & Susanne Winkler (eds.), The Architecture of Focus. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 235-264.
Haegeman, Liliane. 1997. Negative inversion and the structure of CP. Paper presented at The Linguistic Colloquium, University of Wuppertal.
Haegeman, Liliane. 2005. Factives and the left periphery, Lingua 116, 1651-1669. Haegeman, Liliane. 2009. The movement analysis of temporal adverbial clauses, English Language and Linguistics 13, 385-408.
Haegeman, Liliane. 2012. Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and the Composition of the Left Periphery: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keniston, Heyward. 1937. The Syntax of Castillian Prose: The Sixteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2011. Syntactic and morphosyntactic typology and change. In Martin Maiden et al (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, Volume 1: Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ledgeway, Adam & Alessandra Lombardi. 2005. Verb movement, adverbs and clitic positions in Romance, Probus 17, 79-113.
Leonetti, Manuel & Victoria Escandell-Vidal. 2009. Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. In Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds.), Focus and Background in Romance Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 155-204.
Light, Caitlin. 2012. The Syntax and Semantics of Fronting in Germanic, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Mackenzie, Ian. 2010. Refining the V2 hypothesis for Old Spanish, Bulletin of His- panic Studies 87(4), 379-396.
Martín-González, Javier. 2002. The Syntax of Sentential Negation in Spanish, Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2002. The loss of IP-scrambling in Portuguese: clause structure, word-order variation and change. In David Lightfoot (ed.), Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 232-248.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2003. From unity to diversity in Romance syntax. In Kurt Braunmüller & Gisella Ferraresi (eds.), Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 201-233.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2005. Clitic placement, VP-ellipsis and scrambling in Romance, in Monserrat Batllori et al (eds.), Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 175-193.
Nieuwenhuijsen, Dorien. 1999. Cambios en la colocación de los pronombres átonos en la historia del español. Estudios de Lingüistica del Español 5. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. <http://elies.rediris.es/elies5/> [19 October 2012]
Olaerrea, Antxon. 1996. Pre- and Postverbal Subject Positions in Spanish: A Minimalist Account. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle.
Ordóñez, Francisco & Esthela Treviño. 1999. Left-dislocated subjects and the pro- drop parameter: a case study of Spanish, Lingua 107, 39-68.
Poletto, Cecilia. 2002. On V2 and V3 sequences in Rhaetoromance. In Sjef Barbiers, Leonie Cornips & Susanne van der Kleij (eds.), Syntactic Microvariation. Amsterdam: Meertens Institute <http://www.meertens.nl/books/synmic/pdf/ poletto.pdf> [19 October 2012].
Poole, Geoffrey. 2007. Interpolation and the left periphery in Old Spanish. In Miri Hussein, Marina Kolokante & Clare Wright (eds.), Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 13. Newcastle upon Tyne: School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics, Newcastle University.
Pountain, Christopher J. 2001. A History of the Spanish Language Through Texts. Routledge: London.
Ramsden, Herbert. 1963. Weak Pronoun Position in the Early Romance Languages. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Rivero, Maria-Luisa. 1992. Clitic and NP climbing in Old Spanish. In Campos & Martínez-Gil (eds.), 241-282.
Rivero, Maria-Luisa. 1997. On two locations for complement clitic pronouns: Ser- bo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Old Spanish. In van Kemenade & Vincent (eds.), 170-206.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of Grammar. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 281-337.
Rizzi, Luigi. 2001. On the position ‘‘int(errogative)’’ in the left periphery of the clause. In Guglielmo Cinque & Giampaolo Salvi (eds.), Current Studies In Ital- ian Syntax: Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 267-296.
Roberts, Ian. 1999. The C-system in Brythonic Celtic languages, V2 and the EPP. Ms., University of Cambridge.
Rodríguez Ramalle, Teresa. 2003. La gramática de los adverbios en -mente o cómo ex- presar maneras, opiniones y actitudes a través de la lengua. Madrid: Ediciones de la UAM.
Sitaridou, Ioanna. 2011. Word order and information structure in Old Spanish, Cat- alan Journal of Linguistics 10, 159-184.
Sitaridou, Ioanna. 2012. A comparative study of word order in Old Romance, Folia Linguistica 46/2, 553–604.
Uriagereka, Juan. 1995a. An F position in Western Romance. In Katalin É. Kiss (ed.), Discourse Configurational Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 153-175.
Uriagereka, Juan. 1995b. Aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Ro- mance, Linguistic Inquiry 26, 79-124.
van Kemenade, Ans & Nigel Vincent (eds.). 1997. Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Villa-García, Julio. 2011. On the Spanish clausal left edge: in defence of a TopicP account of recomplementation. Paper presented at The linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 41), University of Ottawa, ON, Canada, May 7.
Wanner, Dieter. 1992. The Tobler-Mussafia Law in Old Spanish. In Campos & Martínez-Gil (eds.), 313-378.
Westergaard, Marit. 2009. The Acquisition of Word Order: Micro-cues, Information Structure, and Economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Westergaard, Marit R. & Øystein A. Vangsnes. 2005. Wh-questions, V2, and the left periphery of three Norwegian dialect types. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 8, 117-158.
Zagona, Karen. 2002. The Syntax of Spanish. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa. 1998. Prosody, Focus and Word Order. London: MIT Press.
Downloads
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Las ediciones impresa y electrónica de esta Revista son editadas por el Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, siendo necesario citar la procedencia en cualquier reproducción parcial o total.Salvo indicación contraria, todos los contenidos de la edición electrónica se distribuyen bajo una licencia de uso y distribución “Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional”
. Puede consultar desde aquí la versión informativa y el texto legal de la licencia. Esta circunstancia ha de hacerse constar expresamente de esta forma cuando sea necesario.
- Abstract 393
- PDF 99
