Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Andreas Dufter, Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 434
• Series: Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 214
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Since the advent of syntactic cartography, left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997), much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian, whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations, while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover, the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and information structure, and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.

✦ Table of Contents

Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo: Preface
Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo: Introduction

Section 1. Left Sentence Peripheries in Old Spanish
1 Miriam Bouzouita: Left Dislocation phenomena in Old Spanish. An examination of their structural properties
2 Susann Fischer: Revisiting stylistic fronting in Old Spanish
3 Javier Elvira: Left forever. Subject datives and clitic doubling in Old Spanish

Section 2. Syntactic variation in Modern Spanish
4 Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Melvin González-Rivera: Spanish predicative verbless clauses and the left periphery
5 Steffen Heidinger: Fronting and contrastively focused secondary predicates in Spanish
6 Cristina Sánchez López: The left periphery of Spanish comparative correlatives
7 Silvia Serrano: The article at the left periphery

Section 3. Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
8 Violeta Demonte and Olga Fernández-Soriano: Evidentiality and illocutionary force. Spanish matrix que at the syntax-pragmatics interface
9 Maria Luisa Zubizarreta: On the grammaticalization of the Assertion Structure. A view from Spanish
10 Martin G. Becker: Informational status and the semantics of mood in Spanish preposed complement clauses
11 Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Manuel Leonetti: Fronting and irony in Spanish

Section 4. Spanish among the Romance languages
12 Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga: Left periphery in discourse. Frame Units and discourse markers
13 Eva-Maria Remberger: A comparative look at Focus Fronting in Romance