This paper explores the hypothesis that wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance is a type of locative inversion, involving a null locative argument. Ibero-Romance displays finegrained, systematic variation determined by verbal class and variety, offering evidence that Ibero-Romance neutral word order is SVO, rather than VSO as claimed by some null-subject accounts. It is proposed that 'locative' subject-verb inversion is a consequence of grammaticallyencoded deictic features correlating with the semantic properties of the verbs involved. The locative element, available unequally across Ibero-Romance, can surface in different positions in the left periphery, yielding the variation encountered. The data indicate that the licensing of these constructions depends neither on the null-subject parameter, since this type of inversion also occurs in non-and partial null-subject varieties, nor on the unaccusative/unergative division, though in both cases a degree of correspondence exists.

No abstract

The use of the Ibero-Romance complementiser que in non-embedded contexts with various illocutionary functions is argued to be non-trivially distinct from its canonical function as a marker of subordination. Interpretative and grammatical differences, and variation in the availability and clause-typing of non-embedded ‘exclamative’ and ‘quotative’ illocutionary que across Catalan, European Portuguese and Spanish provide evidence that the subordinating complementiser has been repurposed for the representation of pragmatic information in the complementiser systems of Ibero-Romance, a hypothesis supported by analogies drawn between illocutionary que and illocutionary functions of the interrogative complementiser si/se in Catalan and European Portuguese.

This chapter synthesizes the key findings of Part I, and lays out the proposal for the Utterance Phrase (UP) as the utterance-oriented domain ‘beyond the clause’. U-heads are argued to assemble structure outside the phasal template, such that utterance-oriented constituents (in the specifiers of the UP) are formally connected to the ‘host’ sentence at its leftmost edge without being ‘part of’ that sentence (i.e. its phasal structure). The UP is conceptualized as the locus of utterance packaging of base-generated ‘utterance topics’ (viz. root-like, phase-external adjuncts) interpretatively modificational and hierarchically superior to the CP. Extending the sentence to include the (non-phasal) UP facilitates, in turn, the proposal that ‘dynamic’ conversational moves can be modelled under topological mapping principles within the clausal syntax. Accordingly, a maximally specified ‘rigid’ CP constitutes a simple (single) conversational update, and U-heads connect via their specifiers similarly simple conversational updates to that CP; together, these updates implement a complex conversational move.

En este artículo se analiza la función y distribución del llamado "sujeto expletivo visible" ello/ele/ell en ciertas variedades ibero-románicas no estándares. Se presentan nuevos datos empíricos con el fin de demostrar la caracterización heterogénea del fenómeno, cuya variación actual, según se argumenta, se ve explicada por los distintos grados de cambio sufridos por el elemento expletivo en cada variedad ibero-románica. La contribución pragmática del expletivo ibérico actual semeja el valor semántico de las pruebas empíricas más antiguas y más frecuentes del elemento en los corpus históricos consultados, observación que sirve de punto de partida para reconstruir la trayectoria diacrónica del elemento desde su propuesto origen en contextos impersonales y epistémicos hasta la actualidad, en que el presunto expletivo ibérico demuestra características tanto expletivas como pragmáticas incluso dentro de la misma variedad. Original recibido: 2015/05/28Dictamen enviado al autor: 2015/08/07Aceptado: 2015/09/10

This paper argues for a place for linguistics within the UK Modern Languages curriculum as part of a more pluralistic approach to languages study. Based on an intervention involving over 300 A-level students of French, German and Spanish, we demonstrate: 1) that it is feasible and appropriate to include linguistics topics on the A-level Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) curriculum; 2) that many of these topics are inherently interesting for A-level language students; and 3) that pupils report increased confidence in their language skills after having been exposed to a short linguistics course (four hours). In light of our further finding that there is already considerable untapped scope for linguistics within the current formal framework of the A-level MFL qualification, we recommend that linguistics topics should be included in MFL A-levels as a matter of priority. This is the case not least because linguistics has the potential to attract new pupils to the study of MFL, while also providing a crucial bridge between language skills and cultural content, which are so often kept apart in existing MFL curricula. Lastly, we argue that the introduction of linguistics into languages teaching raises awareness of the harmfulness of deeply entrenched prescriptive and standard-language-ideological beliefs in schools, and this will lead to a more inclusive discipline.

This chapter reconsiders the discursive contribution of the Romance illocutionary complementizer identified here as dialogic que, which is traditionally understood to introduce a ‘speech act’ causal clause. On the basis of a range of syntactic tests for various clause-combining operations (viz. clausal complementation, co-ordination, adverbial subordination, and adjunction) in addition to diachronic and comparative evidence, it is argued that dialogic que constructions are syntactically autonomous utterances which serve primarily to build discourse coherence between the complementizer construction and a salient linguistic antecedent or non-linguistic stimulus. On this view, the complementizer’s insertion enables the speaker to implement an act of grammatically configured ostension, akin to an act of declarative pointing, beyond the utterance it introduces. The role of silence is held to be formally significant, such that an obligatory prosodic break licenses a clause-initial expletive utterance topic whose null status ensures the continuity of the utterance context configuration.

This chapter surveys the categorially heterogeneous taxonomy of conversation-oriented particles and interjections, which are variously characterized as ‘non-syntactic’, ‘autonomous’, ‘deficient’, or otherwise ‘deviant’. It argues that the structural deficiency of these items is merely apparent, and that their incompatibility with a range of formal operations is, paradoxically, a reflection of the complexity of their internal syntax. On this view, utterance-oriented constituents are unified by their topological mapping at the ‘edge of the edge’ of the phasal template where the descriptive content of their interior is (increasingly) irrelevant to their interpretation. Their contribution to the universe of discourse is instead determined through ostension with the result that utterance-oriented constituents are characterized not by what they say but by what they ‘do’. Accordingly, the categorial non-uniformity of taxa such as ‘interjections’ and ‘particles’ results from classifying utterance-oriented items in terms of their interpretation rather than the syntactic category of their lexical root.