A special type of left dislocation in Galician and Portuguese: the D-construction

Abstract

This text analyses the here dubbed D-construction in Galician and European Portuguese, composed of a determiner phrase (DP) followed by a demonstrative pronoun and a main clause. This quite unexplored construction is described as a strategy to promote a referent into the sentence topic and at the same time contrasting it to other salient members of a partially ordered set, by means of the analysis of its pragmatic and prosodic aspects. An existing analysis supposing an appositive role for the demonstrative is argued against, thus strengthening the idea that DP and demonstrative do not form a single constituent. By means of a series of intuition tests, the D-construction is characterised as an instance of Hanging Topic Left Dislocation of a kind found in Germanic languages. Finally, a unified account is put forward for Galician and Portuguese, whenever the structure includes a coreferent clitic in the main clause. In this case the DP is assigned a position in a Frame projection (FrameP), whereas the demonstrative is a base-generated topic in the left periphery, connected to the clitic by long-distance agreement. In European Portuguese, where the structure may also occur without a resumptive clitic, the demonstrative can move into Spec,IP. Either of these are the first part of the derivation, respectively identical to Clitic Left Dislocation or Topicalisation. The paper concludes that the D-construction must be considered a marked syntactic construction on its own terms, and considers some possible themes for future research.

Contrast and word order: A case study on the history of Portuguese

“…13 The demonstrative works as a proclisis trigger in the former due to its [contrast] feature, which is not crucially relevant for word order in MP, and consequently it does not play a role in clitic placement either. 13 This proposal reinforces de Andrade's (2018a) suggestion that the reason why CLD is (apparently) not available in MP is that OuterTopP tends to be mapped to the outside of the clause, thus turning the initial topic a hanging topic. Irrespectively of the possibility of distinguishing between CLD and HTCLD, the fact that the resumptive does not function as a proclisis trigger is an important piece of evidence for the proposed left-peripheral change.…”

“…The ClP examples were obtained from de Almeida 1681and Holanda (1984Holanda ( [1548), two texts available in the Tycho Brahe Corpus. These texts have been compared to the corresponding modern New Testament version in de Almeida (2001), and to some MP sentences either tested with native speakers or found in de Andrade (2018a).…”

“…In view of the lack of morphological case in Portuguese, an anonymous reviewer pointed out that another possible difference between CLD and HTCLD is the adjacency requirement between the initial topic and the resumptive pronoun, holding only in the former(Grohmann 2003). However, in MP there is no clear example in which these elements may appear non-adjacent to the initial topic, according to the intuition tests shown inde Andrade (2018a).…”

The D(emonstrative)-construction

“…A "D(emonstrative)-construction" that features a left-dislocated resumptive d(emonstrative)-pronoun and carries a contrastive topic interpretation has been proposed for European Portuguese (1) and Galician (2) (de Andrade 2018). 1,2 This study explored the acceptance and syntactic properties of an equivalent D-construction in Spanish (3).…”

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This paper explores a newly identified contrastive topic configuration in Spanish. Coined by de Andrade (2018) for Galician and European Portuguese, the Isogloss 2024, 10(1)/5 Isgar, Muntendam & Reglero 2 D(emonstrative)-construction features a left-dislocated topic and d(emonstrative)pronoun resumptive. This study investigates whether the D-construction exists in Spanish, and if so, with which syntactic properties.We administered an acceptability judgment task on the D-construction, Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD), Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD) and Focus Fronting (FF) to Spanish speakers.

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