5.2 The Simple Sentence

Rigau, Gemma; Saldanya, Manuel Pérez

doi:10.1515/9783110450408-007

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…I will flesh out Rodríguez-Mondoñedo's (2006, 2007a, 2007b proposal, whose predictions I believe to be not only accurate but also quite promising for Spanish. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo's works (2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2019) (drawing heavily on Rigau 1988Rigau , 1991Rigau , 1993Rigau , 1997 have convincingly argued that, in Spanish, pivots of existential haber ('to be') are not endowed with person features. The head of the small vP, which case-checks the nominal under the current assumptions, only has number features.…”

Section: Microcontact and Phi-feature Enrichmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I will assume here that the pivot of Spanish haber is not a subject, but an object. First, number agreement must not be taken as evidence that the pivot occupies the subject position; person and number agreement relate to independent features (even to independent projections), and the latter is not necessarily triggered by subjects, as Rigau (1991Rigau ( , 1993Rigau ( , 1997Rigau ( , 2008 has convincingly argued. A similar line of reasoning is pursued in the works by Rodríguez-Mondoñedo (2006, 2007a, where it is argued-I believe, quite convincingly-that the pivot of existential haber, 'to be', is not endowed with (person) features.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Existential Constructions, Definiteness Effects, and Linguistic Contact: At the Crossroads between Spanish and Catalan

Agulló

2023

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Existential sentences in Spanish are sensitive to the definiteness or quantification restriction or effect, which prevents personal pronouns, proper nouns, and definite constituents from occupying the pivot position. Contact varieties between Spanish, a robust language as regards the effect, and Catalan, which has a weaker version, remain largely unexplored. This paper fills this void. A large corpus was gathered to quantitatively study the variation between definite and indefinite pivots. Examples involving definite, specific pivots and even proper names, hitherto unnoticed, are brought to the fore. The pivot of the existential in Spanish is argued to bear Partitive case, as shown by (i) pronominal existential pivots in other Romance languages, (ii) the phi-feature defectiveness of the clitic out of the pivot position, (iii) and partitive pronouns with unaccusatives in Spanish. The hypothesis is put forth that varieties of Spanish in contact with Catalan no longer relate Partitive case to the non-definiteness of the pivot.

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