The goal of this paper is to analyze the properties of (a special type of) ‘split interrogative’ (SI) constructions in Spanish. SIs are wh-questions followed by a phrase that constitutes a possible answer, the ‘tag’. The overall structure is interpreted as a yes/no question (as in what did John… read more
Spanish is generally considered a “word order language” with respect to focus marking, since the syntactic strategies used to alter the canonical order seem to depend on focus type. Thus, prosodically motivated movement is utilized for information narrow focus, and focus fronting, clefting, and… read more
This paper centers on certain aspects of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface. Its main contribution is that it incorporates into the wide crosslinguistic list of grammatical evidentials one type of Spanish que ‘that’, which is claimed to have evolved into this category from a complementizer.… read more
This paper examines the notion of subject and subjecthood by analysing the properties of a construction found in Spanish, as well as in a variety of genetically quite different languages, in which a non-selected dative argument is added to an anticausative construction and may be interpreted as… read more
The phenomenon analyzed in this paper is instantiated by a type of pseudocleft structure in (oral) Spanish, characterized by the fact that when the element which is actually clefted (which is also marked as focus) is an internal argument, it can ‘extend’ its focal status to the constituents… read more