Subject-verb word order in Spanish interrogatives

Abstract

We conduct a quantitative analysis of conversational speech from native speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish to test whether optional non-inversion of subjects in wh-questions (¿qué tú piensas?) is indicative of a movement in Spanish from flexible to rigid word order (Morales 1989;Toribio 2000). We find high rates of subject expression (51%) and a strong preference for SV word order (47%) over VS (4%) in all sentence types, inline with assertions of fixed SVO word order. The usage-based examination of 882 wh-questions shows non-inversion occurs in 14% of the cases (25% of whquestions containing an overt subject). Variable rule analysis reveals subject, verb and question type significantly constrain interrogative word order, but we find no evidence that word order is predicted by perseveration. SV word order is highest in rhetorical and quotative questions, revealing a pathway of change through which word order is becoming fixed in this variety.

Bringing Purported Black Sheep into the Fold: Galician Inflected Infinitives and Puerto Rican Spanish Pre-Verbal Infinitival Subject Pronouns

“…We do not establish comparisons of number between singular and plural because variation in Galician inflected infinitives is restricted in the singular category of number to second person. Regarding priming, overt pronouns prime overt pronouns and null primes null (Cameron and Flores-Ferrán 2004;Travis 2007;Brown and Rivas 2011). Table 3 summarizes how we operationalize each of these linguistic factors in our coding of purpose clauses: Table 3.…”

“…Unlike inflected infinitives, preverbal infinitival subjects arise in a variety of Spanish (Caribbean) that may be in the process of becoming a fixed Subject-Verb-Object language (Suñer 1986;Morales 1989;Toribio 2000). In addition to the existence of preverbal infinitival subject constructions, other evidence in favor of this analysis is the high percentage of preverbal pronominal subjects (see above), the non-inversion of wh-questions (Brown and Rivas 2011), and the loss of the differential object marker a (Alfaraz 2011).…”

Open Information Extraction from real Internet texts in Spanish using constraints over part-of-speech sequences: Problems of the method, their causes, and ways for improvement

“…However, as Figure 3 shows, the incorrect argument order is the least common error type, primarily caused by the inverse word order phenomenon. According to Brown & Rivas (2011), VerbSubject word order is much less common for Spanish than Subject-Verb word order (for example, 4% vs. 47% for Puerto Rican Spanish). This leads to the conclusion that this issue can be left alone and only be approached as a side effect of a solution to a major issue.…”

Cognición y estilo comunicativo: el sujeto posverbal y el objeto sintáctico

“…En otras investigaciones se ha determinado que la frecuencia de la posición posverbal en español es muy escasa (Brown y Rivas 2011;Enríquez 1984;Meyer-Hermann 1990;López Meirama 1997;Morales 1999;Orozco y Guy 2004;Otheguy y Zentella 2007). El corpus que analizamos sigue esta tendencia y los sujetos en posición posverbal constituyen solo un 4.5% del total.…”