Wh‐Movement: Interrogatives, Exclamatives, and Relatives

Francom, Jerid

doi:10.1002/9781118228098.ch25

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The data above point to the inescapable conclusion that inversion is not a feature confined to (wh-)interrogatives (Francom 2012), but a feature of preposed focal phrases more generally. Moreover, it follows from the generalization that focus is the culprit of inversion that the source of inversion in focal contexts including whinterrogatives and wh-exclamatives must be one and the same.…”

Section: The Contentious Analysis Of Obligatory Subject-verb Inversio...mentioning

confidence: 86%

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

Villa-García

2024

isogloss

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Inverting wh-exclamative sentences with an overt complementizer in languages like Spanish pose a serious challenge to traditional accounts of obligatory subject-verb inversion. Such analyses assume either T-to-C movement or Spec,TP as an A-bar position capable of hosting wh-phrases and subjects alike. The optional presence of a complementizer in the head of CP in exclamatives prevents the verb from moving to CP, which argues against an analysis of inversion wherein the verb moves to Cº. Regarding the Spec,TP-as-an-A-bar-position account, if the wh-phrase sits in Spec,TP and competes with the subject for that position, the presence of a complementizer below wh-phrases in exclamatives is then rather mysterious, since que ‘that’ is standardly assumed to signal the presence of CP structure –not IP/TP structure. However, for those cases in which the complementizer occurs, a combined approach consisting of a modification of the Spec,TP-as-an-A-bar-position account which assumes further movement of the exclamative wh-phrase to a CP-related/left-peripheral projection headed by the complementizer is shown to be empirically superior to the competing proposals on the market. Furthermore, dialect data show that the presence of que is sensitive to the type of exclamative phrase in its specifier. The inverting exclamative data with overt que also indicate that it is the full projection consisting of the exclamative wh-phrase in the specifier plus the overt complementizer in the head that needs to be adjacent to the verb in such environments.

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Section: The Contentious Analysis Of Obligatory Subject-verb Inversio...mentioning

confidence: 86%

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

Villa-García

2024

isogloss

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“…In other configurations, the VS order is used in marked contexts, notably when the subject is focused (Olarrea, 2012 ; Ordóñez, 2000 ; Zubizarreta, 1998 ). Furthermore, the VS order is typically observed—and appears to be obligatory in European Spanish—in syntactic configurations like wh-questions and exclamatives (Francom, 2012 ). In relative clauses, which are the focus of our study, both orders are possible, with VS being unmarked and SV typically being used for subject topicalization (Gutiérrez-Bravo, 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Missing VP Illusion in Spanish: Assessing the Role of Language Statistics and Working Memory

Pañeda,

Lago

2024

Open Mind

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In English, double center-embedded sentences yield a so-called “missing VP illusion”: When they are ungrammatical due to a missing verb, they are judged as equally or even more acceptable than their grammatical counterparts. The illusion is often attributed to working memory limitations. Additionally, it has been suggested that statistical differences across languages—e.g., the lower frequency of consecutive verb clusters in verb-initial languages—play a role, since languages with verb-final embedded clauses are less susceptible to the illusion than English. In two speeded acceptability experiments, we demonstrate that the illusion arises in Spanish, a verb-initial language. We also find that the strength of the illusion is modulated by the number of consecutive verbs, consistent with the involvement of language statistics. By contrast, we do not find that participants’ working memory modulates the illusion, failing to support a role of memory limitations. Our results support the generalization that cross-linguistic variation in the missing VP illusion is associated with language statistics and verb position and they demonstrate that this is the case even in languages in which word order is not a reliable processing cue.

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

Pérez

Verdecchia

2022

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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Wh‐Movement: Interrogatives, Exclamatives, and Relatives

Cited by 6 publications

References 19 publications

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

The Missing VP Illusion in Spanish: Assessing the Role of Language Statistics and Working Memory

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

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