Refining the V2 Hypothesis for Old Spanish

Abstract

This paper re-examines the view that medieval Spanish was a V2 language, i.e. one in which the finite verb systematically occupied second position within the minimal clause. Prototypical V2 configurations involve complement-verb word order, whereas the unmarked word order for VP-related constituents appears to have been verb-complement. The paper examines the motivation for the synchronic coexistence of these divergent sequencing possibilities and finds that the complement-verb pattern occurred in four specific cases: (i) where the preverbal complement resumed an item recently mentioned in the discourse; (ii) where it had quantificational force; (iii) where it was a predicate; and (iv) where it was a pseudoargument. The common denominator of these cases is that the preverbal complement was inherently incapable of receiving argument focus. Thus the medieval complement-verb pattern was a device for signalling wide focus unambiguously, in contrast to the verb-complement order, which is well known to exhibit a focus ambiguity between wide focus and argument focus. ResumenEn este artículo se reconsidera la tesis de que el español medieval era una lengua 'V2', es decir una en la que el verbo conjugado ocupa forzosamente la segunda posición dentro de la oración mínima. Las configuraciones V2 más destacadas se presentan con el orden 'complemento-verbo', mientras que el orden no marcado para los sintagmas del VP parece haber sido 'verbo-complemento'. En el artículo se examina la motivación de la co-existencia sincrónica de esos dos órdenes divergentes y se demuestra que el orden 'complemento-verbo' se limitaba a cuatro casos específicos: (i) cuando el complemento preverbal retomaba un sintagma del discurso anterior, (ii) cuando aquel contenía un cuantificador, (iii) cuando era un predicado, o (iv) cuando era un pseudo-argumento. El factor común a los cuatro casos es que el complemento preverbal era incapaz de recibir el foco estrecho de 'argumento'. Por lo tanto, el patrón medieval de complemento-verbo servía para señalar un foco ancho sin ambigüedad, a diferencia del orden verbo-complemento, que se reconoce como ambiguo entre el foco ancho y el foco estrecho (de argumento).

Focus and the syntacticization of discourse

“…In Sections 2 and 3, I consider Quantifier Fronting in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish. I argue, developing observations from Mackenzie (2010), that Old Spanish Quantifier Fronting involves movement to the low left periphery, within a Rizzian articulated left periphery, and that it is interpreted as wide focus. In Modern Spanish, building on Leonetti & Escandell Vidal (2009), I suggest that Modern Spanish Quantifier Fronting also instantiates movement to the low left periphery, but that its information structure interpretation is as verum focus.…”

“…An examination of the wider context of these constructions suggests that Quantifier Fronting does indeed instantiate wide focus during the medieval period. Mackenzie (2010) concludes that Quantifier Fronting in Old Spanish instantiates wide or broad focus. 6…”

“…In this paper I examine two pairs of phenomena, Quantifier Fronting in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish (e.g., Mackenzie 2010;Quer 2002;Leonetti & Escandell Vidal 2009) and declarative verb-clitic orders (primarily V1) in Old Spanish and 'Conservative' Asturian (Fontana 1993;Fernández Rubiera 2009;. The central descriptive observation of the paper is that, in each of these pairs, while the syntax is the same in the medieval period and the modern period, the information structure interpretation differs.…”

“…(2009; 2010). Mackenzie (2010), in the context of a more general discussion of certain object-verb orders in Old Spanish, notes sentences such as (1) and (2), in which a direct object quantifier has been fronted to a position immediately preceding the finite verb. 3 (1)…”

Large Corpora and Historical Syntax: Consequences for the Study of Morphosyntactic Diffusion in the History of Spanish

“…Bernárdez, 1994; López García, 1996, 2011), possibly because the motivations behind this decline do not lie in the gradual loss of enclisis in V1 positions, as has been traditionally argued, but rather in a relatively rapid change in sentence structure, specifically, the information-structural properties of the leftmost (non-peripheral) edge of a (main) sentence, a position from which, from the end of the 16th and the middle of the 17th centuries, non-quantified phrases bearing focus seem to have been excluded (cf. Mackenzie, 2010; Sitaridou, 2011; Sitaridou and Eide, 2014; Batllori and Hernanz, 2015; Batllori, 2016). Be it as it may, it is not without interest – and this is what I would like to underline here – that some of the strongest indications of the periphrastic character of cantarlo he (and hence of its close ties to a wide group of schemas all corresponding to a common basic configuration and disappearing simultaneously) come directly from the very rare group of schemas illustrated in (1), the systematic study of which would not have been possible without the resources of an immense digitized corpus.…”