Sustantivos e interrogativas encubiertas en español

Since Baker (1968) suggested the term concealed question —which, following Autor (forthcoming), we translate as “interrogativa encubierta”— to refer to a DP that complements a verb and can be paraphrased by an indirect question (Preguntó el precio/Preguntó cuál era el precio), one of the most debated issues in the literature on languages other than Spanish has been, beside the concept of concealed question itself, what nouns can appear in this type of constructions. However, this issue has practically gone unnoticed in the descriptive grammar of Spanish. This article aims to deal with the ensuing shortcomings of Spanish grammar as well as to review the proposals that fall outside the context of Hispanic linguistics. Most importantly, on the assumption that concealed questions are predicate complements that are remaining elements of an elliptical specificational copular sentence within an indirect question, it will be shown that the type of noun, though irrelevant for the licensing of this kind of structure, plays an important role in its interpretation.

Aspects of the syntax of ce in French copular sentences

This chapter offers a syntactic analysis of French ce in copular constructions. It is argued that the distribution of ce is best understood in terms of the conditions on the agree operation inside the copular sentence. The proform ce, an expletive, is inserted whenever an agreement relationship cannot be established between an element in the subject position and an element from the PredP (Bowers 1993). Two sources of agreement failure are considered. In one case, agreement failure results from syntactic constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality, criterial freezing) together with focalization. In the other case, agreement failure results from the absence of accessible phi-features on the subject, possibly as the result of a grammatical shift taking place at the interface. This chapter further highlights the relevance of two subject positions (Subj1 and Subj2) each with their own interpretational properties.

Copular Constructions in Syntax

Copular sentences (sentences of the form A is B) have been prominent on the research agenda for linguists and philosophers of language since classical antiquity, and continue to be shrouded in considerable controversy. Central questions in the linguistic literature on copulas and copular sentences are (a) whether predicational, specificational, identificational, and equative copular sentences have a common underlying source; and, if so, (b) how the various surface types of copular sentences are derived from that underlier; (c) whether there is a typology of copulas; and (d) whether copulas are meaningful or meaningless. The debate surrounding the postulation of multiple copular sentence types relies on criteria related to both meaning and form. Analyses based on meaning tend to focus on the question of whether or not one of the terms is a predicate of the other, whether or not the copula contributes meaning, and the information-structural properties of the construction. Analyses based on form focus on the flexibility of the linear ordering of the two terms of the construction, the surface distribution of the copular element, the restrictions imposed on the extraction of the two terms, the case and agreement properties of the construction, the omissibility of the copula or one of the two terms, and the connectivity effects exhibited by the construction. Morphosyntactic variation in the domain of copular elements is an area of research with fruitful intersections between typological and generative approaches. A variety of criteria are presented in the literature to justify the postulation of multiple copulas or underlying representations for copular sentences. Another prolific body of research concerns the semantics of copular sentences. In the assessment of scholarship on copulas and copular sentences, the article critiques the ‘multiple copulas’ approach and examines ways in which the surface variety of copular sentence types can be accounted for in a ‘single copula’ analysis. The analysis of copular constructions continues to have far-reaching consequences in the context of linguistic theory construction, particularly the question of how a predicate combines with its subject in syntactic structure.

The Morpho-Syntax of Clausal Negation in Rural Jordanian Arabic

In this paper, I argue that the Neg particles head their projections, and the negation in a hierarchical representation occurs between TP and VP. In future tense, I argue that the Aux can move to the Neg head just to pick the negation and then the negative particle and the Aux moves to T. I also show that speakers of RJA use different negation constructions depending on the structure and tense of the sentence. For example, the negative particle ma is a preverbal particle used with present and past verbs evenly. The negative particle ma¦-ƒ is a pre and post-verbal particle where ma is a proclitic and -ƒ is an enclitic. This particle is used with present verbs and past verbs. However, when used with present tense verbs, the proclitic ma becomes optional, whereas with past tense verbs the deletion of the proclitic ma results in an ungrammatical sentence. As for copular sentences, the particle miƒ is used to negate verbless copular sentences where there is a covert present tense verb. But, when the copular sentence is formed via a past tense verb, miƒ is no longer used. Instead, the negative construction maâ¦-ƒ is used.

#Je suis Charlie: semantic and prosodic anatomy of an empathic copular sentence

"Je suis Charlie" was used over 619.000 times in the two days that have followed the attack of the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo (Le Progrès, The Huffington Post) and has regularly been taken up in both written and spoken form since. In this paper, we argue that the structure of this sentence actually clashes with its meaning. More specifically, whereas its word order and default rightmost sentence stress are compatible either with an all-focus reading or a narrow focusing of Charlie, the context of use of this sentence as well as the solidarity/empathy message it intends to communicate suggest that its subject is narrowly focused. We will propose that two strategies have emerged to solve this conflict: (i) various alternative forms have appeared that allow proper subject focusing and (ii) speakers have reinterpreted the structure so as to pragmatically retrieve the (additive) focused nature of the subject.

The Linguistic Reflexes of Ontological Dependence

Nouns used to pick out ontologically dependent entities such as holes and flaws, unlike those picking out “ordinary” entities, such as coats and tables, cannot felicitously stand as indefinite subjects of a locative copular sentence (#A hole is in the bucket), but appear freely in there-sentences (There is a hole in the bucket). This contrast is further evidence in favour of the idea that the two sentence types have different underlying predication structures (cf. Barwise and Cooper, 1981; Francez, 2007; Hazout, 2004; McNally 1998a; Williams, 1984, 1994), but also that the preposition in, occurring in both constructions, is ambiguous between a locative and relational meaning. That locative in is distinct from the in that relates a dependent entity to its host is confirmed by inferences between and among sentences containing these two forms. Locative in, whose meaning is roughly that of enclosure or containment, is licensed as a predicate in a locative copular sentence; this sentence type is used to state the location of an entity. However, because a dependent entity’s location is entirely contingent on its host, it cannot be felicitously introduced in this way. By contrast, it is possible to introduce a dependent entity by stating that its host has the dependent entity in it, which is what a there-sentence does. Following Hornstein, Uriagereka and Rosen (1994), the underlying representation of a there-sentence which realizes this relation does not contain a preposition; rather, relational in is derived via incorporation into the copula, like have (Kayne, 1993).