18 desembre, 2020

Autors:
Xavier Villalba & Sílvia Planas-Morales
Títol:
Revista Española de Lingüística 50(2), 83-106Editorial: Sociedad Española de Lingüística
Més informació
Text completEn este artículo proponemos analizar los elementos que encabezan las relativas preposicionales de infinitivo (libros por/para leer) como complementantes preposicionales que se generan en el núcleo de SFinitud. Ello nos permite trazar claras diferencias con las construcciones preposicionales finales y causales y ofrecer al mismo tiempo un análisis uniforme para todas las relativas, sean finitas o no. También sugerimos que la lectura modal asociada a las relativas preposicionales se expresa mediante una categoría funcional específica ligada a la modalidad radical, lo que nos permite explicar parte de las restricciones combinatorias de estas relativas. Por último, proponemos extender este análisis a las relativas de infinitivo introducidas por que (libros que leer).
5 febrer, 2025

Autors:
Real, Espinal & Villalba
Títol:
Vaya in Spanish. From a judgment to a commitment markerEditorial: Journal of Historical Syntax
Data de publicació: 05-02-2025
Pàgines: 26 Més informació
Text completIn 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).
25 abril, 2024

Autors:
Xavier Villalba
Títol:
Romance exclamative markers at the syntax-pragmatics interface: A compositional approach to exclamativityEditorial: Journal of Pragmatics vol. 226 (Elsevier)
Data de publicació: Abril del 2024
Pàgines: 13 Text completIn this paper I will analyze the set of markers that have been associated with exclamative sentence-type and exclamations in Romance, like Catalan ma, mira, que, and si, Italian guarda and che, or Spanish mira, que, si, and vaya. The hypothesis I will defend is that the meaning encoded by each of these markers contribute to create an exclamation speech act. I will show that we must first distinguish mirative markers like ma, mira or guarda, which encode the surprise attitude of the speaker towards a proposition. A second class of elements are degree operators, like si, which create the necessary domain extension on which the attitude of the speaker is built. Finally, I will show that que/che is a marker of exclamative sentence-type. In the second part of the article I will show that these pragmatic differences have a transparent reflex in syntax: mirative markers occupy the Judge Phrase position in Krifka's Speech Act Layer, above ForceP and vocatives, so they may combine with different sentence-types, besides exclamatives. In ForceP we find degree operators (and exclamative wh-phrases) in its specifier, and the sentence-type marker que/che in its head. All in all, the paper aims at showing that a compositional approach to exclamativity can deal with the rich set of pragmatic and syntactic properties of exclamative markers in Romance.
15 febrer, 2024

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 informacióBesides 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.
8 febrer, 2024

Autors:
Xavier Villalba
Títol:
Expressive commitments: A normative approach to exclamationsEditorial: International Review of Pragmatics (Brill)
Data de publicació: 5 de febrer del 2024
Pàgines: 22 Més informacióPragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based on commitments at different levels of meaning, namely, the descriptive and expressive level, can be devised and it can offer interesting answers to old issues, like the contribution of exclamations to discourse, or their at-issue status, while raising new theoretical and empirical questions on lying and deceiving and commitment strength.