The Syntactic Variation of Spanish Dialects

This collective volume offers an up-to-date and comprehensive state-of-the-art presentation of the research that has been done in the syntactic variation of Spanish dialects, taking into account both European and American varieties. In so doing, this book seeks to set the boundary conditions for subsequent investigations on the different manifestations of Spanish syntax and its geographic contours, a very rich (though largely neglected) area of inquiry. Such investigations should ideally lead us not only to pin down the short-range microparameters of Spanish but also to explore its similarities with other languages (closely related or not) and, ultimately, to understand the variation margins that the faculty of language offers. The volume is divided into two parts, each of them dealing with varieties of Europe and America. Empirically, the different chapters cover a wide set of syntactic phenomena and constructions, such as agreement, clitics, doubling, expletives, word order, differential object marking, pro-drop, and more. All in all, this book represents not only an important contribution in the study of Spanish syntax, but also the beginning of a new wave of formal studies of dialectal syntax.

THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS OF ADJECTIVAL DISTRIBUTION IN ADULT POLISH-SPANISH CHILDHOOD BILINGUALS

The present study examines potential age and microparametric effects in childhood bilinguals (currently adults) in an understudied language pairing, Polish-Spanish. Specifically, a Spanish group (N = 28) and a Sequential child bilingual (N = 22) and a Simultaneous bilingual (N = 8) group living in Misiones, Argentina, completed three experimental tasks assessing their knowledge of the syntactic and syntax-semantic distribution of adjectives. Results show that, despite several semantic differences related to adjective position, both experimental groups demonstrate knowledge of interpretive constraints that fall out from underlying Spanish syntax. Differences predicted as a result of crosslinguistic influence were not evidenced, yet, contrary to Polish and Spanish, the experimental groups accepted ungrammatical postnominal intensional adjectives significantly more than Spanish speakers.

“Spanish Is a Language Tu”

Analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction (“What passes with thee?”). This chapter argues that Hemingway’s creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War, but a comparative reading of the fates of the languages associated with the rising US and declining Spanish empires—a reading that reaches back to their moments of interpenetration in the 1600s. Rogers calls Hemingway’s mode of dialogue in the novel “structural Spanglish,” a form of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently and argues For Whom the Bell Tolls makes a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. Briefly examination of several texts that belong in this new genealogy, by Malcolm Lowry, Felipe Alfau, and Ben Lerner.

When focus goes wild: An empirical study of two syntactic positions for information focus

My goal in the present paper is to carry out an analysis of the syntactic and discourse properties of Information Focus (IF) in Southern Peninsular Spanish (SPS) and Standard Spanish (SS) varieties. Generally, it has been argued that IF tends to occur last in a sentence since new information is placed in final position, following the End-Focus Principle as well as the Nuclear Stress Principle (Zubizarreta 1998). Focus fronting has been hence reserved for those cases in which a clear contrast between two alternatives is established, namely Contrastive Focus (CF) and Mirative Focus (MF) (cf. Cruschina 2012). The starting hypothesis here is that IF can appear as a fronted element in a sentence and that SPS speakers show a higher degree of acceptability and grammaticality towards such constructions, as opposed to SS speakers. This points toward a certain degree of microparametric variation in Spanish syntax (an understudied area), which will be tested by means of a grammaticality judgement task run among both SPS and SS speakers.

A method based on rules and machine learning for logic form identification in Spanish

Logic Forms (LF) are simple, first-order logic knowledge representations of natural language sentences. Each noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition and conjunction generates a predicate. LF systems usually identify the syntactic function by means of syntactic rules but this approach is difficult to apply to languages with a high syntax flexibility and ambiguity, for example, Spanish. In this study, we present a mixed method for the derivation of the LF of sentences in Spanish that allows the combination of hard-coded rules and a classifier inspired on semantic role labeling. Thus, the main novelty of our proposal is the way the classifier is applied to generate the predicates of the verbs, while rules are used to translate the rest of the predicates, which are more straightforward and unambiguous than the verbal ones. The proposed mixed system uses a supervised classifier to integrate syntactic and semantic information in order to help overcome the inherent ambiguity of Spanish syntax. This task is accomplished in a similar way to the semantic role labeling task. We use properties extracted from the AnCora-ES corpus in order to train a classifier. A rule-based system is used in order to obtain the LF from the rest of the phrase. The rules are obtained by exploring the syntactic tree of the phrase and encoding the syntactic production rules. The LF algorithm has been evaluated by using shallow parsing with some straightforward Spanish phrases. The verb argument labeling task achieves 84% precision and the proposed mixed LFi method surpasses 11% a system based only on rules.

Syntactic position constrains cross-linguistic activation

There are two competing theories of bilingual lexical access — the language-selective access theory, which proposes that only the lexical items from the intended language are activated for selection during speech planning and comprehension (e.g., Costa, Santesteban, & Ivanova, 2006), and the language non-selective access theory, which proposes that both languages receive activation and compete for production (e.g., Kroll, Bobb, & Wodniecka, 2006). This study examines whether language-specific syntax — the syntactic positioning of a target word in a determiner phrase — can act as a language cue to modulate cross-linguistic activation and whether inhibition resolves competition (e.g., Green, 1998). In two cross-modal priming (+/−Rep) tasks, Spanish-English bilinguals were presented English sentences that were linearly congruent (Canonical Dative and of-Genitive) or incongruent (Dative Double Object and ’s-Genitive) with Spanish syntax and were prompted to make a lexical decision on a Spanish translation of the target word or a control word. The RTs revealed that participants were significantly slower in the incongruent condition (−Rep) than the congruent condition (−Rep) suggesting that language-specific syntax is a language cue that modulates cross-linguistic activation. When participants were prompted to repeat the sentences aloud (+Rep), the translation equivalent was expected to compete with the target word for production, yet no significant difference of RTs was found and the role of inhibition in speech production was not confirmed. Taken together, these findings support the language non-selective access model and further refine current theories of cross-linguistic activation and inhibitory control during bilingual language comprehension and production.

From number agreement to the subjunctive: Evidence for Processability Theory in L2 Spanish

This article contributes to typological plausibility of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998, 2005) by providing empirical data that show that the stages predicted by PT are followed in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. In the present article, the PT stages for L2 Spanish morphology and syntax are first hypothesized after a brief description of PT theory. The results of a corpus of conversational data by L2 Spanish learners ( n = 21) are then presented. Implicational scaling confirmed the five stages for the syntax and morphology with 100% scalability. Evidence was also found for the existence of discrete stages 1,2, 3 and 5 for the syntax as well as stages 1–4 for the morphology. Syntax was also found to emerge before morphology for all learners.