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This paper analyzes in-situ wh-questions in Spanish. It argues that in-situ whphrases in Spanish are actually overtly moved to a left peripheral focus position, their postverbal position being the result of subsequent remnant movement past the focus position. The analysis defended here sets apart the in-situ phenomena of Spanish from the in-situ phenomena occurring in other Romance languages, such as French (as analyzed by Chang, 1997 ; Bo ‡ković, 2000 ; Cheng and Rooryck, 2000), and shows that the purported syntactic mechanisms underlying the distribution of in-situ wh-phrases in those languages are to be amended as far as Spanish is concerned. From a comparative perspective, the Spanish facts support a "pluralistic" approach to in situ strategies (Cheng and Rooryck, 2003), according to which the descriptive notion of in-situ phrase covers a heterogeneous grammatical domain. From a theoretical point of view, our analysis yields support for the idea that many of the phenomena analyzed in the GB tradition in terms of covert movement must be reanalyzed as instances of (masked) overt movement.

In colloquial speech, main clauses in Iberian Spanish can be headed by an overt complementizer. This paper develops the idea that such structures in Spanish involve an extra speech eventuality, and that this speech eventuality is syntactically mapped as a complex verbal predicate. This complex predicate is composed by a light verb and a quotative dependent. It is thus akin to what in other languages are called “Quotative Verbs” framing direct or semi-direct speech (Güldemann 2001). Several types of evidence are brought to bear on issues such as the semantic primitives involved in the quotative predication, and the syntactic configurations giving rise to the complex predicate.