The Grammar of the Utterance

Abstract

This book examines how speakers of Ibero-Romance ‘do things’ with conversational units of language, paying particular attention to what they do with utterance-oriented elements such as vocatives, interjections, and particles; and to what they do with illocutionary complementizers, items attested cross-linguistically which look like, but do not behave like, subordinators. Taking the behaviour of conversation-oriented units of language as a window into the indexical nature of language, it argues that these items provide insight into how language-as-grammar builds the universe of discourse. By identifying the underlying unity in how different Ibero-Romance languages, alongside their Romance cousins and Latin ancestors, use grammar to refer—i.e. to connect our inner world to the one outside—, the book’s empirical arguments are underpinned by the philosophical position that the architecture of grammar is also the architecture of thought. The book thus brings together the recent flurry of work seeking to incorporate aspects of the context of the utterance into the syntax, a line of enquiry broadly founded on empirical considerations, with the pursuit of explanatory adequacy via a so-called ‘un-Cartesian’ grammar of reference. In so doing, it formalizes the intuition that language users do things not with words, but with grammar. The book brings new insight to the comparative morphosyntax of (Ibero-)Romance, particularly in its diatopic, diastrastic, and diamesic dimensions, and showcases the utility of careful descriptive work on this language family in advancing our empirical and conceptual understanding of the organization of grammar.

Evidential Adverbs and Polarity: A Study from Spanish

“…As far as the study of emphasis and polarity is concerned, it is worth mentioning the analysis developed by Camus (2012) on the interpretation of ya "already" in Basque Country or the paper by Palacios and García Tesoro (2014) related to ya in Peru. With regard to the uses of the conjunction que "that" in contexts that are not dependent on a main verb, the investigations of Sansiñena (2017, 2020) and Pérez Fernández et al (2022) from the perspective of insubordinate constructions and the works developed by Corr (2018Corr ( , 2022 from the functional structure of the left periphery should be mentioned. With regard to evidentiality, Olbertz (2007), Fernández-Soriano (2020, 2022), De la Mora and Maldonado (2015), Saito (2019Saito ( , 2021, Martínez Vera (2019, 2023), and Sanromán Vilas (2020 analyze the interpretation and variation of dizque "to say that" and, especially in Demonte and Fernández-Soriano's (2013a, 2013b, 2014 papers, the reportative meaning of conjunction que in independent context.…”