Espinal & Cyrino (2022). A syntactically-driven approach to indefiniteness, specificity and anti-specificity

Autors:

M.T. Espinal & Sonia Cyrino

Títol:

A syntactically-driven approach to indefiniteness, specificity and anti-specificity

Editorial: Journal of Linguistics 58(3), Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: Agost 2022

Més informació

In this paper we present an original approach to analyze the compositionality of indefinite expressions in Romance by investigating the relevance of their syntactic distribution in relation to their meaning. This approach has the advantage of allowing us to explore the question of how syntactic structure can determine the meaning of different forms of indefiniteness. To that end, we postulate a common derivation for bare plurals, bare mass and de phrases, whereby an abstract operator DE is adjoined to definite determiners and shifts entities into property-type expressions. Quantificational specificity is proposed to be derived from a syntactic structure in which weak quantifiers select for indefinite DE-phrases, no matter whether de is overt at Spell-Out or not; these quantifiers turn properties into generalized quantifiers. The anti-specificity meaning of some indefinites is derived by adjoining in the syntactic structure an abstract operator ALG that encodes the speaker’s epistemic state of ignorance to a quantifier encoded for specificity, and it turns a generalized quantifier into a modified generalized quantifier. The paper also brings some general predictions on how indefiniteness is expressed in Romance, as it provides extensive support from five Romance languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish.

Real, Espinal & Villalba (2025). Vaya in Spanish. From a judgment to a commitment marker

Autors:

Real, Espinal & Villalba

Títol:

Vaya in Spanish. From a judgment to a commitment marker

Editorial: Journal of Historical Syntax
Data de publicació: 05-02-2025
Pàgines: 26

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Text complet


In this paper we show the diachronic development of Spanish vaya, which goes from a form of the motion verb ir ‘to go’ to an epistemic verbal discourse marker (VDM) associated with the speaker's judgment regarding a proposition (e.g. ¡Vaya! ‘Wow!’ or ¡Vaya que es donoso! ‘How funny you are!’), and then to a VERUM marker (Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal 2009, Gutzmann, Hartmann & Matthewson 2017) encoding the speaker's strong commitment to the truth of a proposition (e.g ¡Vaya si se casa! ‘You bet he's getting married!’). We argue that this shift is a clear case of a run-of-the-mill process of grammaticalization involving three stages and each change corresponds to a different position of vaya in the articulated Speech Act layer advocated by Manfred Krifka (2021). When vaya expresses a subjective epistemic attitude of the speaker, it is postulated in J(udgement)P(hrase), a position associated with epistemicity and evidentiality; when vaya expresses a strong commitment of the speaker to the truth of the proposition it precedes (i.e., a VERUM marker), it is postulated in the higher Com(mitment)P(hrase). All in all, this study argues that the grammaticalization path of vaya is not only unidirectional (against previous analysis like Octavio de Toledo y Huerta 2001 and Company Company 2008), but rather obligatorily implies a bottom-up reanalysis (Roberts & Roussou 2003).

Mendia & Espinal (2024). Non-agreeing degree constructions

Autors:

Jon Ander Mendia & Maria Teresa Espinal

Títol:

Non-agreeing degree constructions

Editorial: Journal of Linguistics (Cambridge University Press)
Data de publicació: Online: 4 juny 2024
Pàgines: 36

Text complet

This paper deals with a construction, which we dub Non-Agreeing Degree (NAD) constructions, with the distinguishing property that the agreement pattern between subjects and degree predicates is optionally disrupted, even in languages (like Spanish) where verbs commonly agree with their subjects. We show that the agreeing versus non-agreeing alternation comes with important semantic differences for the interpretation of the degree construction. We provide a first systematic description of this type of constructions and postulate a formal syntactic and semantic analysis. We argue that NAD constructions are characterized by degree predicates that introduce a non-conventional nominal scale and by subjects that are interpreted as equally non-conventional units of measurement. We postulate an intensionalization process on the subject of NAD constructions, which we capture via a general nominalization function that allows a default as well as an ordinary agreement pattern between subject and copula.

Etxeberria, Espinal & Tubau (2024). Establishing the limits between Polarity Sensitivity, Negative Polarity and Negative Concord

Autors:

Urtzi Etxeberria, M.Teresa Espinal & Susagna Tubau

Títol:

Establishing the limits between Polarity Sensitivity, Negative Polarity and Negative Concord

Editorial: Linguistic Typology (de Gruyter)
Data de publicació: 4 d'abril del 2024

Text complet

In this paper, by focussing on the behaviour of polarity elements from a variety of languages from different language families (namely, Basque, Hindi, English, Romanian, Spanish, Greek, Czech, and Russian) we investigate the relationship between Polarity Sensitive Items (PSIs) and Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) on the one hand, and between PSIs and Negative Concord items (NCIs) on the other. Based on a number of contrasts that we find, we argue that: (i) if a language has PSIs it does not necessarily have NCIs; (ii) PSIs need to be distinguished from NPIs; (iii) NCIs emerge as a subtype of PSIs, not of NPIs; and (iv) all languages that show Negative Concord (NC) also have Polarity Sensitivity (PS), but the opposite does not hold. We thus postulate that PS is a general phenomenon across languages with Negative Polarity (NPol) and NC as possible subtypes of PS but independent among them, and argue against the standard hypothesis that NC is a special subtype of NPol.

Espinal, Real & Villalba (2024). From a movement verb to an epistemic discourse marker. The diachronic change of Spanish ‘vaya’

Autors:

M.Teresa Espinal, Cristina Real-Puidgollers i Xavier Villalba

Títol:

From a movement verb to an epistemic discourse marker. The diachronic change of Spanish 'vaya'

Editorial: Linguistic Variation (John Benjamins)
Data de publicació: Febrer del 2024
Pàgines: 36

Més informació

Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.