Predicate doubling in Spanish: On how discourse may mimic syntactic movement

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“…Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022) suggest that, in this case, the IP doublet offers a coherent answer to the QUD instantiated in the topicalized predicate simply because a hyponymy relationship holds between the internal arguments of the topicalized and the fully inflected predicate, respectively, i.e. păstrăv/'trout' has the properties of fish, and it brings an additional specification about the type of fish.…”

“…This is, in fact, what Romanian has in common with Spanish. Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022) propose that, in Spanish the topicalized verb/vP in predicate doubling functions as a contrastive topic as defined by Büring (2003). As such, first of all it brings to attention an immediate QUD that has been implicitely (or explicitely) formulated in the preceding chunk of discourse.…”

“…Starting from the assumption that discourse chunks are built around relevant set(s) of immediate questions under discussion, Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022) propose that the topicalized predicate in predicate doubling instantiates a contrastive topic (CT) (defined as in Büring 2003) that calls attention upon an explicit or implicit immediate QUD and feeds the formulation of other sets of questions alternative to the initial QUD. More specifically, as summarized in (49) from Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022: 1176), their proposal rests on the empirical observations: (i) that the topicalized verb/vP, Predicate 1, functions as a contrastive topic and (ii) Predicate 2 marks narrow focus on a constituent inside the vP or verum focus on the main verb and provides answers to the relevant QUD:…”

“…The current study 1 focuses on discussing the syntactic and discourse-related (information structure) properties of Romanian verbal predicate doubling, illustrated in (1a-b) below, and on providing a theoretical account for this type of construction that rejects a derivation resulting from syntactic movement (based on multiple copy spell-out à la Nunes 2004) and argues instead for a discourse-framed explanation as outlined in Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022).…”

“…Predicate doubling occurs in a large variety of languages and has been used in syntactic research to support various theoretical accounts such the multiple copy theory of movement developed in Nunes ( 2004) or late adjunction of the arguments of the fronted predicate (Landau 2007), to name just a few. I argue for a base generation account of Romanian predicate doubling, drawing upon the framework implemented in Muñoz Pérez & Verdecchia (2022). This framework takes into consideration information structure and the way in which discourse develops by answering relevant questions under discussion.…”