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

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Introduction

Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de ToledoUniversity of Munich

Since at least since the 1990s, the investigation of the left sentence periphery has taken center-stage in both descriptive and in more theory-driven syntactic research. Even if most scholars would probably agree that the grammatical organization of the left sen-tence periphery is intimately linked with the structuring of information and discourse, the extent – and the limits – of cross-linguistic variation in the syntax–discourse inter-face at the left edge of sentences continue to be a subject of much scholarly debate. Within generative linguistics, Rizzi’s (1997) seminal article established what has now come to be known as the cartographic approach, developing a hierarchy of functional projections, like Force, Topic, Focus and Finiteness, on the basis of a large number of regularities observed in Modern Standard Italian. While subsequent proposals have argued for a number of modifications and amendments to Rizzi’s original hierarchy of projections within the complementizer space (see Aboh 1998, Benincà 2001, Benincà & Poletto 2004, Rizzi 2004, Benincà 2006, Rizzi 2013, among many others), the central tenets of syntactic cartography have nevertheless found widespread acceptance. Such tenets include the integration of information structural notions into the set of syntac-tic features and projections and the crucial role of movement driven by interpretable features. At the same time, alternative approaches to cartography are currently being explored, with less articulate syntactic maps and a greater emphasis on the derivation itself (see Shlonsky 2010 and van Gelderen 2013 for recent comparative assessments of cartographic and non-cartographic approaches). In any event, the exploration of syn-tactic fine structure in the left periphery lends a fresh perspective to the study of mi-cro- and macro-variation, i.e., the cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic differences that can arise in the range of left sentence peripheries possible.

The aim of this volume is to advance and refine our understanding of both invari-able and variant aspects of left sentence peripheries in Spanish. The thirteen articles compiled in this volume can broadly be grouped into the following four sections: (i) three papers analyzing the left periphery of Old Spanish sentences (by Bouzouita, Elvira, and Fischer), (ii) four papers addressing left-peripheral syntactic variation in contemporary Spanish (by Gutiérrez-Rexach & González-Rivera, Heidinger, Sánchez López, and Serrano), (iii) four papers devoted to the syntax–semantics interface found


Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo

in the left periphery of contemporary Spanish sentences, and its pragmatic implica-tions (by Demonte & Fernández-Soriano, Zubizarreta, Becker, and Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti), (iv) and finally, two papers which offer a comparative Romance perspec-tive, investigating Spanish against the backdrop of some of its closest relatives (by Borreguero Zuloaga and Remberger).

In the remainder of this introduction, we will seek to pinpoint where each of these individual investigations lie in terms of the larger research context. We will begin by outlining major syntactic evolutions from Latin to Medieval Romance (Section 1), before focusing on aspects of variation in Modern Spanish sentence syntax (Section 2). Following this, the left sentence periphery in Spanish will be explored as a privileged area for the expression of information structure and illocutionary force (Section 3). By way of conclusion, we will point out some syntactic commonalities and differences between Spanish and other Romance null subject languages, including Catalan, Sardinian and Italian (Section 4).

1. From Latin to Spanish

Classical Latin is well known for exhibiting a particularly wide range of syntactic or-dering possibilities, most notably so in verse, but also in more elaborate prose texts such as Cicero’s speeches. Most Indo-Europeanists and Classical philologists would probably agree that the typologically basic order of the major syntactic constituents in Latin, during the period of the Roman Republic and the Empire, is subject–object–verb (SOV), even if the actual frequencies of verb-final finite clauses differ consider-ably between authors and texts (Linde 1923). Dating as far back as the popular plays of Plautus from the third and early second century BC, (S)VO orders have always proven to be very common, particularly in independent clauses (Adams 1976). This long-term historical trend away from the inherited Indo-European SOV type towards later Latin (and Romance) SVO can arguably be observed as early as in pre-classical Latin, especially in the more innovative main clauses and in (literary representations of) col-loquial registers (however see Pinkster 1991 for some cautionary remarks). The fre-quency of verb-final orderings diminishes further in Late Latin, as can be seen in the Peregrinatio Aetheriae, a fourth-century text in which Egeria, an erudite nun from the north-western Iberian Peninsula, reports about her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In this text, verb-final orderings only account for 25% and 37% in main and subordinate clauses respectively, according to Linde (1923: 156). Throughout the documented his-tory of Latin, the clause-initial position has not only been able to accommodate topical subjects, but also other types of topics, such as indirect experiencer objects or scene-setting adverbial expressions (cf. Spevak 2010). Since other non-subject constituents occurring in initial position appear to be foci, Salvi (2005) and Ledgeway (2011: 425–428) argue that Latin syntax already boasts an articulate CP field in much the same way as modern Romance languages do. In other respects, however, Latin exhibits


Introduction

considerably more syntactic flexibility than medieval and modern varieties of Romance. Classical Latin, in particular, readily resorts to partial constituent fronting in order to achieve focus (or at least some effect of ‘emphatic highlighting’) on discon-tinuous constituent subparts such as magnam ‘great’ in (1):

(1) Magnam haec res Caesari difficultatem ad great.acc this.nom thing.nom Caesar.dat difficulty.acc to consilium capiendum adferebat. decision.acc to-be-taken.acc took ‘This action caused great perplexity to Caesar in the selection of his plans.’ (Caesar, De bello Gallico VII,10; Salvi 2005: 440; transl. McDevitte & Bohn)

Apart from the basic SOV and SVO orderings and the various fronting operations available for topic and focus expressions, a VSO ordering can also be employed, al-beit as a less frequent variant that is only possible in very specific circumstances. Taking stock of verb-first clauses in Classical and post-classical Latin prose, Devine & Stephens (2006) identify a number of important subcases, including thetic sentences, sentences with polarity focus, presentational and existential sentences and passives, i.e. constructions lacking a prototypical agentive subject. According to Bossong (1984, 2006), the development from (Old) Latin SOV to Romance SVO must have necessar-ily involved an intermediate stage in which VSO is generalized to a such a degree that it has to be considered the unmarked type. This extension of verb-first orderings can most clearly be seen, Bossong argues, in the oldest extant documents of the Ibero-Romance languages, such as the Glosas Emilianenses. While the date of composition of the Glosas is debatable – with suggestions ranging from the second half of the tenth century to the last quarter of the eleventh century – Latin SV(O) orders are system-atically rendered in the Romance glosses as VS(O). In fact, VS(O) orderings still attain frequencies between 37% and 48% in Old Spanish texts from the fourteenth century, and continue to be grammatical in contemporary Spanish (Neumann-Holzschuh 1997: 223), whereas they have been lost over time in other Romance languages such as Portuguese and French. Given the particularity of this variability of subject posi-tions in Spanish, it is no wonder that the debate about whether preverbal subjects are base-generated (within TP) or displaced (into a higher functional position in CP), is particularly intense in the field of Spanish syntax (see López 2009: 130–134, Pöll 2010, Villa-García 2012, 2013).

Much of the recent research on topical arguments in the preverbal field in Spanish has adopted Cinque’s (1990, 1997) distinction, which was originally estab-lished to distinguish between Hanging Topic Left Dislocations (HTLDs) and Clitic Left Dislocations (CLLDs) in Italian. Hanging Topics do not receive any case-mark-ing – hence the traditional designation nominativus pendens –, allow for a wide range of pronominal or lexical resumptive elements clause-internally and appear to be, at least for the majority of cases, restricted to root clauses. By contrast, Clitic Left Dislocations exhibit characteristics such as connectedness and island-sensitivity



which give them a more ‘syntactically organized’ flavor (see Olarrea 2012). Conse-quently, different syntactic positions have been proposed for both types of Topics, with Hanging Topics in a projection higher up in the CP field.

In her contribution “Left Dislocation phenomena in Old Spanish: An examination of their structural properties”, Miriam Bouzouita discusses the characteristics of syn-tactic displacements into the left clausal periphery in Old Spanish. A careful investiga-tion of texts from the thirteenth through the fifteenth century leads her to conclude that dislocations occur at a considerably lower frequency than in the contemporary language and that no sharp differentiation can be proven between Hanging Topics and Clitic Left Dislocations. One reason for this is simply that in Old Spanish there are fewer case-marked arguments than in the modern language, since case marking with direct objects only occurs in a small subset of the cases for which it has come to be obligatory in contemporary Spanish (see Laca 2006 and von Heusinger 2008 for de-tails). As a consequence of this, many non-case-marked topic arguments in the left periphery of Old Spanish cannot be classified as either Hanging Topics or instances of Clitic Left Dislocation on formal grounds alone. While the large number of displaced topics that seem to fit into both the Hanging Topic and Clitic Left Dislocation catego-ries do not alone preclude the existence of both categories in Old Spanish, other find-ings discussed by Bouzouita prove to be more complicated: In particular, case-marked left dislocated constituents can be resumed by elements other than pronominal clitics, and dislocated elements without the appropriate case marking, i.e., with a characteris-tic typical of Hanging Topics, can also be found in subordinate clauses, contrary to what is generally assumed for modern Romance languages. All in all, Bouzouita’s find-ings therefore suggest a more flexible range of topic displacement constructions in Old Spanish (see also Elvira 1994, Fernández-Ordóñez 2009, Poole 2013) and a progressive grammaticalization of connectedness and locality restrictions for Clitic Left Dislocations spanning from the medieval to the modern period.

A different class of syntactic displacements constitutes the subject of Susann Fischer’s article “Revisiting Stylistic Fronting in Old Spanish”. Stylistic Fronting is a term coined by Maling (1980) to designate a syntactic operation in Icelandic whereby a wide range of elements, including infinitives and participles, surface in the left claus-al periphery without there being any obvious semantic or pragmatic motivation for the displacement into the CP field. In the aftermath of Maling’s (1980, 1990) work on Icelandic, Stylistic Fronting has been identified and described in other Germanic lan-guages and medieval Romance varieties, including Old Spanish (Fontana 1993), Old Catalan (Fischer 2002), Old French (Mathieu 2006, Salvesen 2011), and Old Tuscan (Franco 2009). As the term “stylistic” already suggests, many analyses of this operation postulate that the operation is either ‘post-syntactic’, i.e., purely phonological without any semantic consequence whatsoever, or a kind of syntactic movement driven by formal requirements only, such as the need to fill an otherwise empty specifier position of CP in rigid verb-second languages. In her article, Fischer argues against this view. According to Fischer, Stylistic Fronting in Old Spanish, as well as in other medieval


Introduction

varieties of Romance languages, indeed has a bearing on information and discourse structure, as it serves to foreground or put a focus on the fronted verbal element. This analysis appears to be superior to previous explanations offered in the literature for Stylistic Fronting in medieval Ibero-Romance languages since evidence of a rigid verb-second organization in these varieties remains inconclusive (cf. Batllori, Iglésias & Martins 2005). Moreover, Stylistic Fronting with participles can occasionally be found way beyond the supposedly verb-second medieval stage of Castilian (see Rodríguez Molina 2010: 1353–1354 for attestations from Golden Age and eighteenth-century Spanish, see Sitaridou 2011, 2012 for arguments against assuming verb-second syntax in Old Ibero-Romance languages). From this perspective, the progressive ousting of Stylistic Fronting, which can be observed throughout the history of Spanish, reflects an overarching trend away from a discourse-configurational structure to a more sub-ject-prominent grammatical organization of the language.

The final contribution in the diachronic section of this volume is Javier Elvira’s article “Left forever: subject datives and clitic doubling in Old Spanish”. This article sheds new light on the historical evolution of clitic doubling with indirect ob-jects or dative arguments, as can be seen in Spanish A Maríai lei ofrecieron un regalo, lit. ‘To María, they offered her a gift’. In contemporary usage, datives with co-indexed clitics such as le have become obligatory in an increasing number of contexts, and have turned out to be strongly preferred over simple dative arguments in other contexts, especially in American Spanish. While syntactic doubling with datives or indirect ob-jects is also attested in other varieties of Romance, for instance in colloquial Italian, Spanish seems to be unique in having generalized the pattern across all dialects and registers, including the standard variety. In particular, clitic doubling has become compulsory with stressable dative pronouns and with lexical indirect objects occur-ring to the left of the finite verb. Such preverbal lexical or stressable pronominal indirect objects are often analyzed as left-dislocated topics, even though not all occur-rences of clitic doubling would necessarily favor such an interpretation on semantic and pragmatic grounds (cf. cases of clitic-doubled non-referential datives such as A nadie le conviene cambiar el sistema, lit. ‘It is in no one’s interest to change the system’ (CREA)). In his article, Elvira seeks to identify the syntactic environments in which clitic doubling with indirect objects seems to have originated, and investigate its sub-sequent extension to an increasingly wider range of contexts. In Old Spanish, clitic doubling constructions constitute a comparatively rare variant, being mostly restrict-ed to stative two-argument predicates, such as plazer ‘please’ with a dative experiencer argument. Elvira argues that these experiencer arguments are more successfully ana-lyzed as ‘quirky’ dative subjects, thus relating the origin of clitic doubling to topical subject dislocation structures. Given the relative scarcity of two-argument predicates with such dative subjects in Old Spanish, on both the type and the token levels, and given their remarkable increase during the Golden Age Spanish period, the extension of clitic doubling with dative arguments is, above all, a consequence of changes in the verbal lexicon. Later on, clitic doubling is gaining ground with other types of dative or



indirect object arguments, and with non-argumental datives. More generally, Elvira presents convincing arguments against the standard practice of treating indirect ob-jects in two- argument and in ditransitive constructions on a par in descriptions of clitic doubling in Spanish (see, e.g., Riiho 1988, Company Company 2006). While such a clear-cut view of clitic doubling may be feasible for the present-day language, it fails to capture the non-random nature of its extension throughout the history of Spanish. Once again, diachrony serves as a valuable complement in refining our un-derstanding of syntactic variation in contemporary language usage.

To sum up thus far, we may surmise that over time, fronting to the left periphery in order to highlight or place focus on (non-subject) constituents has become mostly restricted to cases of contrastive focus. Furthermore, we suspect an increasing degree of grammatical organization in topic fronting constructions, whereby Clitic Left Dis-locations and Hanging Topics have acquired distinct properties and erstwhile clitic doublings of preverbal dative subject arguments have gradually been extended to the point of becoming the predominant pattern for all kinds of indirect objects.

2. Aspects of Modern Spanish clause structure

The four articles that constitute the second part of this volume all provide case stud-ies of syntactic variation within contemporary Standard Spanish, investigating pred-icative verbless clauses (Gutiérrez-Rexach & González-Rivera), contrastive foci (Heidinger), correlative constructions (Sánchez López) and complement clauses introduced by a determiner in front of the complementizer (Serrano). These contri-butions hereby explore the explanatory potential of an articulate CP layer, discuss, among other things, the nature and inventory of primitive features driving move-ment to the left periphery and consider instances of seemingly optional movement to left-peripheral positions.

In the article “Spanish predicative verbless clauses and the Left Periphery”, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Melvin González-Rivera seek to delimit the range of accept-able assertive utterances such as Muy bueno, este vino, lit. ‘Very good, this wine’. Such structures have been to date syntactically analyzed in a number of different ways. While some accounts posit copula deletion followed by right-dislocation of the subject (i.e., adjunction to TP), others assume two independent clauses, and others again clas-sify this structure as a small clause headed by a Relator Phrase (cf. den Dikken 2006). Gutiérrez-Rexach & González-Rivera show that, although all three of these analyses capture different facets of the properties of verbless predicative clauses, none of them can provide an exhaustive account of the full range of syntactic and semantic restric-tions observed for both the first and second parts of these bipartite structures: Only evaluative, gradable property-denoting expressions may occur as first parts, whereas relational or other non-gradable adjectives and subject complements may not (cf. *Chileno, este vino ‘Chilean, this wine’). In the second part of the construction,


Introduction

non-specific and most types of quantified subjects are ruled out (cf. *Muy bueno, un vino ‘Very good, a wine’). As Gutiérrez-Rexach and González-Rivera argue in this ar-ticle, these semantic restrictions, and the exclamative flavor typically associated with verbless predicative clauses, naturally ensue in the frame of an analysis which posits, in addition to a null relator element, a strong feature [+affective] associated with the predicational term. This feature has to be checked in a left peripheral focus projection which falls within the scope of a degree operator. In general, we can learn from Gutiérrez-Rexach and González-Rivera’s article about how the expressive dimension as defined by Potts (2007) can find a natural syntactic home in a CP structure hosting illocutionary, focus and degree operators. By virtue of such a hierarchy of functional projections, non-canonical syntactic variants, like verbless predicative clauses for example, can be syntactically analyzed in ways that capture their marked discourse-pragmatic status.

The second article in this section on syntactic variation is Steffen Heidinger’s “Fronting and contrastively focused secondary predicates in Spanish”. Heidinger be-gins with a discussion of the relation between contrastive focus and focus fronting in Modern Spanish. Focus fronting, Heidinger argues, is not restricted to elements bear-ing contrastive focus, nor is fronting compulsory with contrastively focused elements. Constituents targeted by contrastive focus may in principle be fronted, extraposed at the right sentential edge or remain in situ. In either three of these structural positions, they are likely to enjoy prosodic highlighting, like prominence conveyed by sentential accent or stress for example. In general, descriptive grammars remain silent about the possible determinants influencing the choice between in situ, left- and right-peripher-al positioning of descriptive foci. In order to come to grips with these variable order-ings, Heidinger conducted a production experiment by collecting relevant data from speakers of Peninsular Spanish. Contrary to what one might expect, no attestations of focus fronting are found in his data, neither for secondary predicates nor for direct objects or locative adverbials. Secondary predicates tend to occur in situ, after the fi-nite verb, possibly followed by object or adverbial constituents, whilst locative adverbi-als prefer to receive contrastive focus in a right-peripheral position. This reluctance of contrastively focused elements to undergo fronting is likely to come as a surprise to those familiar with standard grammatical descriptions, which often simply fail to weigh in on the variable linearization options. In any event, Heidinger’s findings lend further support to claims formulated in previous studies, including that of Adli (2011), who observed quite similar ordering preferences in the judgement tasks he conducted with speakers of Peninsular Spanish.

The remaining two articles in this section on variation address issues related to the syntax of subordinate clauses. In Spanish, as is the case in English, certain types of ad-verbial subordinate clauses, especially those with conditional or temporal semantics, precede their matrix clause in what arguably constitutes the unmarked clausal sequenc-ing. Such adverbial clauses occurring in the left periphery of their superordinate clause have been analyzed as specifiers of a Topic Phrase (see, e.g., Haegeman 2003a,b), on



both empirical and conceptual grounds. In her contribution “The left periphery of Spanish comparative correlatives”, Cristina Sánchez López scrutinizes another class of complex sentences in which subordinate clauses typically precede their superordinate partners. Spanish comparative correlative constructions such as cuanto más avanzo tanto más me hundo (‘The more I progress, the more I sink’, Mario Mendoza (CREA)) are biclausal structures which, unlike in English, formally distinguish between the cor-relative clause headed by cuanto and a correlatum clause. This correlatum clause may, but need not, be introduced by tanto before a comparative such as más ‘more’ or menos ‘less’. Following up on her earlier work (see Sánchez López 2008, 2010), the author ar-gues that the correlative clause headed by cuanto is not adjoined, but rather subordi-nated to the correlatum clause. What this entails is that cuanto must be considered a relative element with quantificational semantics, functioning either as a determiner (cf. cuantas cosas ‘how many things’) or as a pronoun. In a similar spirit to the analysis of verbless predications developed by Gutiérrez-Rexach & González-Rivera, the treat-ment of the biclausal correlative constructions offered by Sánchez López relies on the Predicator Phrase proposed by den Dikken (2006). In this analysis, the obligatory pres-ence of both the correlative and the correlatum clause falls out for free. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that both ordering variants of the two clauses are possible, and that each is associated with different information structural effects. For sentences in which the subordinate correlative clause headed by cuanto precedes the correlatum clause, a number of topic-like qualities become evident, not unlike those of fronted conditional clauses. This is straightforwardly accounted for by assuming movement of the cuanto-clause into a higher Topic projection. Conversely, expressions such as tanto más ‘the more’ which can introduce the matrix correlatum clause, however not the cor-relative clausal partner, are assumed to sit in the specifier of the Focus Phrase projection in the CP layer of the correlatum. In summary, the new analysis presented in this article succeeds in explaining the formal and information structural asymmetries as well as the semantic interaction between both propositions.

Yet another peculiar characteristic of the Spanish complementizer area is investi-gated in “The article at the left periphery” by Silvia Serrano. In some, but not all sub-ject and object complement clauses, the complementizer que ‘that’ can be preceded by the singular masculine definite article el ‘the’. To date, the choice between the variants que and el que has not attracted much attention among syntacticians, dialectologists or sociolinguists. Intuitively at least, no systematic difference between que and el que seems to be discernible in terms of geographical distribution or register. The prevailing view continues to subscribe to the suggestions made by Demonte (1977) and Luján (1980). These authors start out from the assumption that the el que variant in the left periphery of complement clauses is only licensed in factive clauses. Inspired by the classic account of factivity in Kiparsky & Kiparsky (1970), Demonte and Luján both maintain that el que results from eliding the noun in the sequence el hecho que ‘the fact that’. This, in turn, entails that clausal arguments headed by el que constitute determiner or noun phrases rather than CPs. In her contribution, Serrano takes issue


Introduction

with this account, on both syntactic and semantic grounds. To begin with, the non-elliptical variant el hecho que is ungrammatical at least in standard varieties of Spanish, where clausal DP modifiers need to be introduced by the preposition de ‘of ’. Therefore, the full-fledged version of el que is el hecho de que rather than el hecho que, and it does not seem compelling to conceive of an analysis of this variation in terms of ellipsis of a non-constituent. Additionally, Serrano demonstrates that clauses headed by el que dif-fer from unequivocal cases of ellipsis when it comes to extraction. Semantic shortcom-ings of the factivity account include factive clausal complements in which either the el que or the el hecho de que variant turns out to be ungrammatical, and cases of non-factive complement clauses in which el que seems perfectly acceptable. In order to provide a more adequate syntactic treatment, Serrano seeks to determine with the greatest accuracy possible the range of predicates that license el que clauses to function as subject or object complements. On this basis, Serrano argues that the semantic in-variant of all contexts which license the el que complementizer is the backgrounded status of the embedded proposition rather than its presupposed nature, as proponents of a factivity account assume. Once more, the general lesson is that the research agen-das of descriptive and theoretical syntax are neither disjoint nor antagonistic in rela-tion to one another. Rather, it is precisely the more fine-grained descriptions that can pave the way for improved analyses which can in turn shed new light on the factors underlying variation in syntax.

3. Syntax and its interfaces with semantics and pragmatics

In the impressive body of published work on left sentence peripheries, interface explo-rations play a central role, and for obvious reasons: The left periphery is a privileged locus for semantic and pragmatic operators which take scope over the entire proposi-tion, like sentence adverbials, indicators of clause type or illocutionary force, and, moreover, it notoriously attracts phrasal constituents and syntactic heads endowed with different sorts of topic or focus properties. It is therefore no wonder that most, if not all, of the articles contained in this volume have also taken considerations of a se-mantic and/or pragmatic nature into account at some point in their syntactic argu-mentation. At the same time, the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics appear to figure most prominently in four papers, in which the complex relationship between clause- and sentence-level syntactic structures and the range of interpreta-tions associated with each of these is at the center of the discussion.

This section opens with the article “Evidentiality and illocutionary force: Spanish matrix que at the syntax–pragmatics interface” by Violeta Demonte and Olga Fernández-Soriano. It has long been observed (see, e.g., Spitzer 1942) that que ‘that’, in spite of being the subordinating complementizer par excellence in Spanish, may also introduce independent clauses, even when uttered out of the blue, for example at the beginning of a conversation. While in some cases, such independent utterances



introduced by que qualify as exclamatives or discourse fragments, other utterances headed by que do not seem to be amenable to such analyses. Intuitively, independent declaratives headed by que have been described as “narrative” or “explicative” (Spitzer 1942). In recent times, Etxepare (2010) has classified que in declarative root sentences as a quotative marker, which enters into a small clause with a silent nominal predicate. In their contribution, Demonte and Fernández-Soriano offer a critical assessment of this analysis, and argue that a distinction between two types of que root declaratives needs to be made. In the first type, que has evolved into an indirect reportative eviden-tial marker, signaling that the assertion of the proposition is based on secondary sources or inferences. In the second type, que declaratives have an ‘echoic’ character, and in some cases, a silent underlying verb of saying may be posited. In contrast to reportative que, echoic que cannot occur discourse-initially. Demonte and Fernández-Soriano present a detailed comparison of these two types of que root declaratives and point out a number of syntactic and discourse semantic differences.

Syntactic manifestations of semantic and pragmatic partitionings, such as focus/background and assertion/presupposition, also figure prominently in the sec-ond article of this section on interfaces, namely in Maria Luisa Zubizarreta’s “On the grammaticalization of the Assertion Structure: A view from Spanish”. Zubizarreta investigates specificational pseudo-cleft sentences, such as What Peter needs is a course in linguistics, which have enjoyed ongoing attention in the linguistic literature on English since at least Akmajian (1970) and Higgins (1976). In semantic terms, it has been argued that the matrix clause of specificational pseudo-clefts provides a value for the open proposition expressed in the subordinate relative(-like) clause, and that the post-copular matrix clause contains the focus of the entire biclausal structure. In all varieties of Spanish, pseudo-clefts introduced by one of the counter-parts to the free wh-relative items found in English are solidly implemented both in writing and in speech. In colloquial registers of Peninsular Spanish, somewhat more flexibility than in the standard language is found in the range of cleftable focus phrase expressions (Fernández-Soriano 2009). In particular, parts of idioms and other ‘undetachable’ constituent subparts are licensed to occur as clefted expres-sions, albeit not with any type of relative subordinator. While Fernández-Soriano (2009) takes this as evidence in favor of a monoclausal analysis of pseudo-clefts in-volving movement to a designated focus position, Zubizarreta points out a number of agreement facts which run counter to the predictions made by a monoclausal structural account. She then proceeds to a new analysis of these colloquial pseudo-clefts in terms of a biclausal structure which is not derived via focus-driven move-ment, but by operations of ellipsis. Zubizarreta extends this line of analysis to a construction found in Caribbean, Colombian and Venezuelan Spanish (and has an exact counterpart, one might add, in Brazilian Portuguese). In all these varieties, a reduced type of pseudo-cleft has been documented in which the relative item is elid-ed. Standard Spanish Donde yo vivo es en Caracas, lit. ‘Where I live is in Caracas’, thus becomes Yo vivo es en Caracas, lit. ‘I live is in Caracas’ (cf. Sedano 1990, 2003,


Introduction

Méndez-Vallejo 2009, Pato Maldonado 2010). Building upon the rich set of data from Bucaramanga, Colombia, which is investigated in Méndez-Vallejo (2009), Zubizarreta argues that even for these reduced pseudo-clefts, a biclausal analysis is most successful in accounting for syntactic properties regarding binding and con-stituent order, and the semantic consequences of the operator-variable structures induced by the syntactic partitioning of the propositional content. The copula, there-fore, specifies the domain of focus and the scope of the assertion, as can be seen most perspicuously in the presence of quantified expressions or negation. Moreover, Zubizarreta proposes that the same line of analysis in terms of syntactic reduplica-tion and (partial) ellipsis may also be extended to marked ordering variants such as VOS or VSO in simple sentences of Spanish. In doing so, she explicitly abandons her own influential prosody-driven movement analysis set forth in previous work (see in particular Zubizarreta 1998, see also Abraham 2007 for Germanic) in favor of ad-junction or reduplication-plus-ellipsis approaches.

Clausal subordination is also at stake in Martin G. Becker’s article “Informational status and the semantics of mood in Spanish preposed complement clauses”. Based on corpus data from written and spoken registers, Becker discusses the factors that have been claimed to influence the choice between indicative and subjunctive mood in complement clauses which precede their matrix clause. In the literature, most authors, following the lead of Terrell & Hooper (1974), capitalize on the role of discourse prag-matics. In fronted object complement clauses, subjunctive mood has typically been ascribed to the backgrounded or presupposed status or to the low informativity of the propositional content. Becker illustrates the inherent risk of circularity in explanative attempts couched in such pragmatic approaches. In particular, discourse-pragmatic approaches fail to account for cases of indicative verbs occurring in fronted comple-ment clauses which, in their respective contexts, must be said to encode information known to both speaker and hearer. On the other hand, there are also instances of sub-junctive mood in fronted complement clauses which do convey informationally ‘rich’ content within their respective discourse contexts. Having demonstrated the short-comings of existing pragmatic approaches, Becker moves on to advocate an alternative approach based on the semantics of subjunctive mood. More specifically, he proposes that instead of referring to a state of affairs, fronted complement clauses in subjunctive mood receive an intensional reading. Following up on this, Becker illustrates the con-sequences of this for the interpretation of fronted complement clauses and shows how the choice between indicative and subjunctive may be exploited for rhetorical pur-poses. By opting for the subjunctive, speakers can signal “epistemic distance” with re-spect to the propositional content expressed in the complement clause. Conversely, indicative clauses tend to convey higher degrees of commitment to the truth of the proposition contained therein.

In “Fronting and irony in Spanish”, Victoria Escandell-Vidal and Manuel Leonetti zoom in on another aspect of syntactic structure guiding semantic and pragmatic in-terpretation. While irony has enjoyed a privileged place in many fields of research,



including rhetoric, literary studies, pragmatics and cognitive science, linguistic cues signaling an ironic intention have attracted much less systematic scrutiny. It is true that, occasionally, possible paralinguistic exponents of irony such as voice quality have been studied (see, e.g., Bryant & Fox Tree 2005) and that hyperbolic lexical choices have been identified as being favorable to ironic interpretations (Kreuz & Roberts 1995). However, not much ink has been spilled on potential grammatical cues indicat-ing irony since the times of the seventeen-century Dutch scholar Vossius who ob-served that “sometimes, indeed, irony is recognized through the place of words alone” (Nonnumquam vero ironia ipso vocum situ cognoscitur) (Vossius 1643: II,154). Regarding Spanish, we can find a small number of relevant remarks scattered in the literature (cf. in particular Beinhauer 1930: 133–136 and Bosque 1980: 106–108), which note that an ironic interpretation may be enhanced by fronting non-subject constituents. However, all these occasional remarks fail to offer any kind of principled explanation. In their article, Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti venture to tackle this analytic challenge. Elaborating upon previous work of their own (Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal 2009), they show that the cases of fronting to the left sentence periphery which tend to be associated with ironic readings cannot be said to constitute instances of left dislocation or of focus fronting, since the latter has become by and large restricted to quantifiers and contrastive foci in Modern Spanish (see Quer 2002, Camus Bergareche 2008 and Remberger in this volume). Rather, Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti maintain that these instances of leftward movement constitute a type of their own. In this third type of fronting, movement to the left periphery serves to achieve a verum focus inter-pretation for the whole sentence. Verum focus fronting seems to constitute a solidly implanted type of movement in Spanish, whilst it constitutes a rather marginal type in closely related Romance languages such as Catalan and Italian (Leonetti 2010). By virtue of laying special emphasis on the veridicality of the proposition expressed in the sentence, speakers of Spanish employ a sort of syntactic hyperbole, exaggerating, so to speak, the truthfulness of the literal content. In other words, the propensity for certain marked kinds of fronting to trigger irony follows from the marked verum focus struc-ture associated with these instances of fronting to the left periphery. Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti thus manage to derive invited pragmatic interpretations from focus structure, and focus structure from syntax. Moreover, they argue that their line of analysis lends further support to the classification of irony as inherently echoic men-tion (Sperber & Wilson 1992, Wilson 2006), in contexts of “relevant inappropriate-ness” (Attardo 2000). Finally, the authors mention a number of other grammatical preferences that can be observed in ironic utterances in Spanish, such as the tendency to employ VSO orderings rather than VOS, or the much higher incidence of the periphrastic future in comparison with the simple future tense. The contribution con-cludes by suggesting that these preferences are likewise amenable to a Relevance- theoretic approach which gives great consideration to the interpretive potential of focus structure.


Introduction

4. Spanish and its closest relatives

The two articles in the last section of this volume adopt a somewhat broader perspec-tive, comparing Spanish to other Romance languages. As is well known, all modern varieties of Romance languages adhere, albeit with varying degrees of strictness, to (S)VO syntax in declarative sentences. However, varieties of Romance languages differ interestingly from one another in to what extent non-subject constituents may occur in the preverbal area. Besides sentence-related topics and foci, there are also a number of other candidates for left-peripheral syntactic positions. These obviously include sentence connectives, and anaphoric and other cohesive elements which link the sen-tence to previous segments of text or discourse. Furthermore, the left periphery also attracts framing elements and discourse topics, which may remain semantically active beyond the end of the sentence in which they occur, possibly even within larger stretches of the subsequent discourse.

Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga examines some facets of discourse organization in Spanish and Italian in her article, “Left periphery in discourse: Frame Units and dis-course markers”. She begins with a presentation of the so-called Basel Model (Ferrari 2003), which elaborates on models of discourse segmentation originally developed for spoken French at the universities of Aix-en-Provence and Geneva (see Blanche- Benveniste 1994 and Roulet et al. 2001). In a nutshell, the theory assumes the existence of three discourse-pragmatic ‘fields’ for each utterance, viz. the Frame, the Nucleus and the Appendix. Both the Frame and the Appendix need not be filled, whereas the Nucleus, being the locus of both the propositional content and the expression of illo-cutionary force, must be realized. Borreguero Zuloaga surveys the range of discourse semantic and pragmatic functions fulfilled by Frame Units and proposes a taxonomy consisting of three principal types. She then proceeds to analyze adverbs which, when occurring as Frame Units, may acquire additional argumentative functions, such as the Spanish additive focus particle también ‘also’, which signals co-orientation or even increasing relevance of the following proposition within the line of argumentation pursued in the larger discourse segment. By contrast, anche, the Italian counterpart to también, cannot be employed as an argumentative connective in the same way in this left-peripheral Frame position. Similar contrasts explored by Borreguero Zuloaga are found between Spanish entonces and Italian allora, both glossable as ‘then’. While both words have acquired, in addition to their basic uses as temporal adverbs, more abstract functions as discourse connectives in the Frame position, Italian has been shown to permit a wider range of such discursive functions than Spanish. Borreguero Zuloaga suggests that these functional differences may be related to the differences observed in syntactic behavior within the lower functional field of the Nucleus Unit. In any event, it seems that fine-grained analyses of closely related languages can provide useful test-ing grounds for syntactic theory (see also Kayne 2005).

The final contribution to this volume is Eva-Maria Remberger’s “A comparative look at Focus Fronting in Romance”. Remberger surveys the options available for



moving different sorts of focused phrasal constituents and focused heads into the left periphery, contrasting contemporary and earlier stages of Spanish with Catalan, Sardinian, standard Italian and Sicilian. Sardinian stands out as being the variety which presents the widest range of focus fronting possibilities. On the syntactic level, this propensity for focus fronting is manifest, in that the language not only exhibits front-ing with arguments and adjuncts, but also with non-finite parts of complex verbal predicates and with copula complements. On the level of information structure, Sardinian is also able to accept a greater range of semantic and pragmatic focus types in the left periphery than is possible in the other varieties of Romance discussed by Remberger, since it not only allows fronting with contrastive foci, but also with em-phatic and even ‘pure’ information foci. Within Italo-Romance languages and dialects, Sicilian also permits focus fronting with many constituents carrying the information focus, even if fewer types of syntactic units are susceptible to being fronted than in Sardinian (Cruschina 2012). Both Sardinian and Sicilian contrast with Standard Italian and modern Catalan and Spanish, in which the fronting of non-contrastively focused elements appears more constrained. Diachronically, Spanish, Italian and Catalan have all undergone gradual restrictions in their focus fronting capacities. For the modern varieties of these languages, this translates into a somewhat archaic, literary or even stilted character associated with some of the remaining non-contrastive instances of focus fronting (see also the marked status of many instances of so-called “Stylistic Fronting” noted in Fischer in this volume). Readers familiar with historical Romance linguistics will note that, once again, Sardinian seems to have evolved the least from its Latin origins, while Catalan and Spanish have significantly altered, and possibly re-duced, their discourse-configurational characteristics. Regarding Spanish, Remberger proposes that not all instances of the class of verum focus frontings identified by Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal (2009) (cf. also Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti in this vol-ume) can be treated on a par. In particular, she suggests that the fronting of Quantifier Phrases, the fronting of phrasal constituents carrying special emphasis (in accordance with the definition as provided in Frey 2010) and the fronting of contrastive topics should each be regarded as distinct operations, since each of them has distinct conse-quences for the interpretation that follows. In cartographic terms, this implies that instead of positing a unitary focus position in the left clausal periphery, different tar-gets would have to be assumed for contrastive and non-contrastive foci. Remberger concludes with an overview of a number of grammatical properties of focus fronting in Sardinian, assesses the extent to which these properties also hold in the other variet-ies of Romance under consideration, and suggests implicational relationships. In par-ticular, if a Romance language or dialect allows information foci to be fronted, this entails that fronting is also possible for emphatic foci, which in turn entails the possi-bility of contrastive focus fronting. It goes without saying that additional evidence from other language families would be welcome in order to gain a deeper understand-ing of cross-linguistic trends of movement into the left sentence periphery.


Introduction

In conclusion, the articles compiled in the volume Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish offer converging evidence for the existence of an articulate syntactic structure in the higher functional field, and refine our understanding of the systematic interrela-tions between syntax, sentence semantics and pragmatic interpretations. More specifi-cally, the papers by Borreguero Zuloaga and Remberger in this volume corroborate previous claims that stated that there was a need to identify and distinguish between different information structural types of topics and foci (cf. Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007, Frascarelli & Ramaglia 2013 for topics in Italian, and Cruschina 2012 for foci). Heidinger’s paper is dedicated to focus fronting, or rather, to the striking absence of fronted contrastive foci in elicited spoken Spanish. Fronting operations marking po-larity or verum focus are interpreted as powerful signals of ironic speaker intentions in the paper by Escandell-Vidal & Leonetti. Different types of semantic and pragmatic impact of que ‘that’ introducing root clauses are identified in the paper by Demonte & Fernández-Soriano, and variation in the selection of complementizers and mood in fronted subordinate clauses are related to subtle differences in interpretation in the papers by Serrano and Becker, respectively. Gutiérrez-Rexach & González-Rivera, Sánchez López and Zubizarreta develop syntactic analyses relying heavily on left-pe-ripheral fine structure in order to account for the distributional and interpretive re-strictions found with verbless predicative clauses, correlative constructions, and American Spanish reduced cleft clauses. Finally, the three papers concentrating on left sentence peripheries in Medieval Spanish, by Bouzouita, Fischer, and Elvira, trace back the origins and outline the historical evolution of topic and focus fronting opera-tions into the left periphery. Left sentence peripheries constitute a fascinating field of inquiry, and have become a thriving area of research in Hispanic linguistics, as this collection of papers endeavors to show.

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Documents

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