The word order of constructions with a verb, a subject, and adirect object in spoken Spanish

Ocampo, Francisco A

doi:10.1075/cilt.123.21oca

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Finally, a few studies examine corpora including long stretches of naturalistic conversation. Ocampo (1995;) documents a variety of strategies for marking focus, noting a lack of one-to-one correspondence between context and any given construction. In his corpora, most sentences have canonical word order and the focus is not always stressed.…”

Section: The Empirical Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

Hoot

Leal

Destruel

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The literature on focus in Spanish contains a divide between theoretical claims and quantitative empirical evidence: While Spanish is often regarded as resorting to syntactic movement to mark focus, quantitative and/or experimental data often do not support this claim. Research focusing on non-final objects within the VP can provide valuable clarity to the empirical picture, especially when evidence is gathered using multiple methods, a practice known as triangulation. In this article, we use three different tasks (judgments, sentence processing, and production) to provide evidence of object focus marking in Spanish. We found that: (i) canonical orders (object in-situ) were preferred overall; (ii) marking object focus via movement strategies is possiblewe find a relationship between object-focus marking and non-canonical (S)VPPO order, as predicted by mainstream syntactic accounts; and (iii) Spanish focus is not marked asymmetrically by position (subjects vs. non-subjects). Overall, results show canonical orders (i.e., SVOPP) can be used to realize focus on any constituent, while their non-canonical counterparts are contextually restricted. This finding suggests mainstream syntactic accounts in which information structure triggers syntactic movement may need to be revised to include alternative focus-marking mechanisms.

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Section: The Empirical Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

Hoot

Leal

Destruel

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…In Sentence 2a the sentential subject bears the actor macrorole, while in 2b, the subject bears the undergoer macrorole. A consequence of this distinction is that although Spanish is a subject-verb-object (SVO) language (Contreras, 1991;Hernanz & Brucart, 1987;Ocampo, 1995;Suñer, 1982, among others), a sentence like Sentence 2b is considered less acceptable than a sentence like Sentence 3 (see Arnaiz, 1998;Bakovic, 1998;Contreras, 1976;Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2007;Ordoñez & Treviño, 1999;Zubizarreta, 1998, for some theoretical work and examples on the issue).…”

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confidence: 99%

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

Gattei

Dickey

Wainselboim

et al. 2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand "who did what to whom" in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models.

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“…Bocota); in addition, all the nonMesoamerican languages of Central America have a strict OV order. In opposition to these features, Spanish is SVO, and though it allows for almost all other word orders in running discourse (d. Ocampo 1992Ocampo , 1995 and hence is similar to (some of) the Mayan languages -and consequently different from the Intermediate ones -that similarity has nothing to do with influence, as shown by the simple fact Downloaded by [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] at 20:08 04 April 2016 that such word order flexibility is also found in Peninsular Spanish. On the other hand, Spanish is similar to some of the Intermediate languages and Mesoamerican languages of Central America in terms of the so-called 'pro-drop parameter' (the non-obligatory realization of a subject NP), but this similarity is precisely typological, not due to contact.…”

Section: Typological Features Of the Indigenous Languages Of Central mentioning

confidence: 95%

On Language Contact: Another Look at Spanish-speaking (Central) America

Quesada¹

2000

Hispanic Research Journal

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The word order of constructions with a verb, a subject, and adirect object in spoken Spanish

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks

The thematic hierarchy in sentence comprehension: A study on the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

On Language Contact: Another Look at Spanish-speaking (Central) America

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