Abstract:Syntactic movement is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language and, as such, has played a key role in syntactic theorizing. Nonetheless, an understanding of the mechanism that allows a constituent to appear to the right of its base-generated position has remained elusive. This groundbreaking research monograph aims to address this gap in our knowledge by expanding the inventory of languages and data sets traditionally considered in the literature. Specifically, Ortega-Santos analyzes the interplay between fo… Show more
“…Within L-AcT, détachement instances are identified on the basis of their unusual distribution, their prosodic performance, morpho-syntactic and semantic features, justifying the assumption of a specific information function called the Appendix of Comment (APC). Specifically, the article will argue that APC cannot be considered a kind of postponed Topic, as if the latter's semantic content and function were essentially maintained, as often assumed in literature (Lambrecht 1981(Lambrecht , 1994Lombardi-Vallauri 2009Ortega-Santos 2016). We will explain that the difference does not depend only on their evident distribution (Topic before Comment vs. APC after it) and respective prosodic performance, via prefix unit for Topic and suffix unit for APC (see 2.2), but also for their broad difference in morpho-syntactic fulfilment and semantic features as corpus-based research makes emerge (see 3.1 and 4).…”
The article deals with the détachement instances, an aspect of spoken language differing from the binary structure (Topic-Comment) considered to both semantically and informationally form the basic unit of spoken language. According to Language into Act Theory, détachment instances are considered specific information units called Appendix of Comment (APC), with a clear distinction from the Topic unit. The APC may be formally identified in the corpus through its distribution after the Comment and its prosodic performance via a suffix unit. The APC records a frequency value of 4.28% of reference units, which is significantly lower than that of the Topic (close to 20%). The morpho-syntactic fillings of the APC show a kind of “randomness”, that cannot truly be generalized, unlike Topic, since they are employed “in the moment”, as late adjunctions, echoes, repetitions, deictics, and formulas. APC doesn’t constitute a syntactic/semantic island, as Topic does, and its content is ultimately irrelevant, lacks an independent modality and is de-focused. The APC’s features confirm the specificity of its information function in order to textually integrate with the Comment, facilitating an agreement with the addressee, while the Topic serves as the field of application for the illocutionary force. The purpose of the article is to explain the distinction between the previous information functions by demonstrating the specific role of Appendix through examples derived from Italian corpus analysis.
“…Within L-AcT, détachement instances are identified on the basis of their unusual distribution, their prosodic performance, morpho-syntactic and semantic features, justifying the assumption of a specific information function called the Appendix of Comment (APC). Specifically, the article will argue that APC cannot be considered a kind of postponed Topic, as if the latter's semantic content and function were essentially maintained, as often assumed in literature (Lambrecht 1981(Lambrecht , 1994Lombardi-Vallauri 2009Ortega-Santos 2016). We will explain that the difference does not depend only on their evident distribution (Topic before Comment vs. APC after it) and respective prosodic performance, via prefix unit for Topic and suffix unit for APC (see 2.2), but also for their broad difference in morpho-syntactic fulfilment and semantic features as corpus-based research makes emerge (see 3.1 and 4).…”
The article deals with the détachement instances, an aspect of spoken language differing from the binary structure (Topic-Comment) considered to both semantically and informationally form the basic unit of spoken language. According to Language into Act Theory, détachment instances are considered specific information units called Appendix of Comment (APC), with a clear distinction from the Topic unit. The APC may be formally identified in the corpus through its distribution after the Comment and its prosodic performance via a suffix unit. The APC records a frequency value of 4.28% of reference units, which is significantly lower than that of the Topic (close to 20%). The morpho-syntactic fillings of the APC show a kind of “randomness”, that cannot truly be generalized, unlike Topic, since they are employed “in the moment”, as late adjunctions, echoes, repetitions, deictics, and formulas. APC doesn’t constitute a syntactic/semantic island, as Topic does, and its content is ultimately irrelevant, lacks an independent modality and is de-focused. The APC’s features confirm the specificity of its information function in order to textually integrate with the Comment, facilitating an agreement with the addressee, while the Topic serves as the field of application for the illocutionary force. The purpose of the article is to explain the distinction between the previous information functions by demonstrating the specific role of Appendix through examples derived from Italian corpus analysis.
“…Spanish is traditionally assumed to have a free word order, since it shows many linear possibilities other than the canonical pattern SVO (Ordóñez 1998; Villa‐García 2015; Ortega‐Santos 2016). For example, for a sentence such as Susana escribió el libro ‘Susana wrote the book’, Jiménez‐Fernández (2020) lists the following additional word orders (among others):…”
Section: Discourse‐feature‐driven Movement In Spanishmentioning
This paper aims to reconsider the purpose of movement and its Last-Resort nature. In conformity with Chomsky (2008) and Jim enez-Fern andez (2020), the apparent optional movement in Spanish is not free at base, but related to the discourse-feature inheritance. However, I depart from the latter by arguing that these discourse features do not work in tandem with the EF in T in order to attract the relevant constituent to [Spec,TP]; rather, movement may be required by the need to preserve the functional relations established through Agree, i.e., probe-goal union (PGU) formulated in Miyagawa (2010). Furthermore, in light of Last Resort, I propose that PGU should be revised in a way that the goal moves into the probe if and only if no other more economical alternative is available to manifest the established functional relations. We shall see that Contrastive Focus and DOM constructions in Spanish empirically evidence the Revised PGU approach, and some self-evident predictions based on it also prove the advantage of the current proposal.
“…Restrictions should nonetheless be defined in terms of which factors force a particular intentional base, not which type of verb heads the construction. Consider, in this respect, the well-known facts noted by Torrego Masullo 1992, Uribe-Etxebarria 1992, Zubizarreta 1998, Gallego 2007, Jiménez-Fernández & İşsever 2012, Jiménez-Fernández & Miyagawa 2014, Ortega-Santos 2016, and Villa-García 2018. My proposal adopts this view, but it restricts the type of informational features that T may host to the UG feature [DI]; accordingly, only two types of constituents can internally merge in Spec,TP under conditions of structural and/or pragmatic prominence: DPs and locative phrases.…”
This article approaches locative inversion as a construction resulting from valuation of the core intentional feature [DI] (for discourse intention) by a locative constituent to obtain an event-reporting thetic statement that expresses a state of affairs located in some spatiotemporal coordinates. I argue that in languages where [DI] is an EPP feature, as is the case with Spanish, the locative is internally merged in Spec,TP, competing with the subject for this position with respect to prominence conditions. Two types of locative-inversion constructions therefore obtain: (i) core locative inversion, where the locative phrase is structurally prominent, and (ii) deictic locative inversion, where the locative phrase is nonprominent but must be merged in Spec,TP for reasons of interface economy. The article explores in detail the differences between the two and the predicted differences between Spanish and other languages, such as English, where the EPP is not informational but formal in nature.
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