Weak Subject Pronouns in Caribbean Spanish and XP Pied-Piping

Ordóñez, Francisco; Olarrea, Antxon

doi:10.1075/cilt.222.15ord

Cited by 9 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…It should be noted also that although there are varieties of Spanish in which inversion in wh ‐questions is not required (primarily in the Caribbean; see Ordóñez & Olarrea 2001, Suñer 1994, Toribio 2000), there is no reason to think that any of the subjects in this experiment were speakers of such a variety. All were from northern Mexico, where wh ‐questions without inversion are strongly unacceptable, and where there does not appear to be significant contact with varieties that permit noninversion.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Syntactic Satiation and the Inversion Effect in English and SpanishWh‐Questions

Goodall

2011

Syntax

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. Both English and Spanish exhibit an inversion effect in wh‐questions: a verbal element must appear to the left of the subject. Analyses differ, however, as to whether this effect is due to similar syntactic mechanisms in the two languages or not. The phenomenon of judgment satiation, in which certain unacceptable sentence types improve upon repeated exposure, is used here to provide new evidence addressing this issue. It is shown that unacceptable wh‐questions in Spanish are susceptible to satiation, but their counterparts in English are not, which suggests that different mechanisms are responsible for the inversion effect in the two languages. In addition to providing new evidence regarding the nature of inversion in wh‐questions, this study also constitutes a test case for using satiation in the service of comparative syntax.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Syntactic Satiation and the Inversion Effect in English and SpanishWh‐Questions

Goodall

2011

Syntax

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“…According to a number of researchers, such strong disagreement is not indicative of variation among or within varieties of Caribbean Spanish, but rather due to two major shortcomings affecting the literature to varying degrees. Specifically, it has been observed that the examples provided to illustrate whSV order are discrepant, since many of these actually contain wh-expressions that fail to be simple and/or argumental and, thus, allow for noninversion of the subject and the verb in Spanish (Ordóñez & Olarrea 2001;2006). Moreover, it has been pointed out that pertinent claims are usually based on personal impression, anecdote as well as questionnaires distributed to native speakers, rather than on unequivocal empirical evidence based on large-scale quantitative analyses of natural speech (Heap 1990;Suñer & Lizardi 1995;D'Introno 2000;.…”

Section: Results From a Large-scale Quantitative Analysis Of Colloquimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the present paper, I make use of 'simple' to refer to argumental wh-expressions that do not comprise more than two words in General Spanish orthography. Therefore, I exclude heavy as well as complex argumental wh-expressions that, similar to non-argumental ones, allow for noninversion of the subject and the verb in Spanish to varying degrees (inter alia Torrego 1984;Ordóñez & Treviño 1999;Zubizarreta 1999;Ordóñez & Olarrea 2001;2006;Ordóñez 2016). Note that, in the vast majority of established argumental wh-interrogatives, the wh-expression consists of a single word.…”

Section: San José De Las Matasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contact with an African substrate, on the other hand, is altogether dubious, since it is not verifiable (Núñez Cedeño 1983;Heap 1990;Ordóñez & Olarrea 2001). Moreover, whSV order fails to be encountered in other 'Africanized' varieties (Heap 1990), and the languages spoken by the slaves imported from Africa were most probably typologically distinct and, presumably, did not all admit such word order (Núñez Cedeño 1983;Green 1997).…”

Section: Previous Approaches To Whsv Order In Varieties Of Caribbean mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…18 Isogloss 2019, 5/2 Michael Zimmermann access a mentally co-present innovative non-null subject variety (Toribio 1993;2000a;b cf. also Cabrera-Puche 2008), (v) the existence of a paradigm of subject pronouns that are 'weak' in the terminology of Cardinaletti & Starke (1999) and that remnant-move along with the verb (Ordóñez & Olarrea 2001;2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Reconsidering the syntax of interrogatives in Caribbean Spanish. With especial reference to Dominican Spanish

Zimmermann

2020

isogloss

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This paper readdresses one of the most conspicuous syntactic traits of varieties of Caribbean Spanish that has been on the research agenda ever since almost a hundred years ago: the preverbal occurrence of subjects in interrogatives with a fronted simple non-subject argumental wh-expression. In an attempt to shed more light on the still highly controversial issues of the frequency of whSV order and the kind(s) of preverbal subject, the present paper initially gathers claims regarding these issues as well as examples from the literature and then presents the corresponding results from a refined large-scale quantitative analysis of natural speech from colloquial Dominican Spanish, hereby filling a long-standing lacuna. Furthermore, the paper discusses previous approaches and shows that none of these are free from problems. Drawing on relevant aspects of earlier approaches and building on insights into the morpho-syntactic status of subject pronouns as well as word order in medieval French, the paper eventually argues that whSV order in Dominican, and by extension, in other varieties of Caribbean Spanish, follows from ongoing morpho-syntactic changes that possibly result in the resetting of the null subject parameter: the development of a paradigm of weak subject pronouns, the concomitant establishment of a dedicated subject position, SpecTP, and the overall strong tendency towards SV order.

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Wh‐Movement: Interrogatives, Exclamatives, and Relatives

Francom

2012

The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics

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Weak Subject Pronouns in Caribbean Spanish and XP Pied-Piping

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Syntactic Satiation and the Inversion Effect in English and SpanishWh‐Questions

Syntactic Satiation and the Inversion Effect in English and SpanishWh‐Questions

Reconsidering the syntax of interrogatives in Caribbean Spanish. With especial reference to Dominican Spanish

Wh‐Movement: Interrogatives, Exclamatives, and Relatives

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