This article gives an Optimality Theory analysis of the resolution of vowel hiatus across word boundaries based on published descriptions of late 19th and early 20th century Moroccan Judeo-Spanish, also known as haketía. Our analysis builds upon recent accounts of hiatus resolution in contemporary non-Sephardic Spanish varieties. We argue that, instead of a markedness constraint requiring syllables to have onsets (Onset), the avoidance of vowel sequences (*Hiatus) is the driver of hiatus resolution strategies, which include (i) diphthongization of non-identical vowels via gliding of the higher vowel, (ii) coalescence of identical vowels, and (iii) deletion and coalescence of mid vowels. We formalize a novel account of mid vowel alternations. Correspondence constraints against vowel deletion refer to the markedness of vowel features and to the structure of the morpheme-initial syllable rhyme containing the target vowel. A markedness constraint penalizes adjacent round vocoids within a syllable. Our analysis explains why hiatus resolution fails to apply when the second vowel bears nuclear phrasal stress, a pattern also observed elsewhere in present-day Ibero-Romance. We extend the analysis to cover stylistic and typological variation in Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish and Chicano Spanish, while avoiding several complications of previous theoretical accounts.
Low não, a novel negative construction in Brazilian Portuguese, is infrequent in corpus analyses, raising the question of whether it represents a fully licensed but rare variant or reflects an emerging pattern whose grammatical status is not yet stable across speakers. This study evaluates speakers’ acceptability judgments and reaction times using a speeded acceptability judgment task to test predictions from generative approaches and usage-based accounts. Results from 37 participants show that low não is consistently rated lower than canonical não, yet higher than ungrammatical distractors. Reaction times are comparable to ungrammatical distractors, suggesting increased evaluation effort. The data also reveal substantial interspeaker variability across both acceptability and processing measures. The combination of intermediate acceptability, longer reaction times, and structured variability observed in this study is compatible with both generative and usage-based accounts but is more parsimoniously captured by usage-based approaches in which differences in experience and entrenchment give rise to graded variation in acceptability and processing dynamics. Overall, these results illustrate how experimental methods can provide insight into both synchronic distribution of novel constructions and the mechanisms that may underlie syntactic change, while highlighting the importance of modelling acceptability and processing as partially dissociable dimensions of linguistic evaluation.
This paper demonstrates how our understanding of indefinite object drop can inform our understanding of other constructions involving bare nouns and indefinite null arguments in Spanish. We extend the proposal of indefinite object drop developed by Martínez-García et al. (2025) to internal arguments of some intransitive constructions (specifically, unaccusative and passive se-constructions). Our findings reveal that the same lexical constraints that govern the distribution of indefinite object drop in Spanish also apply to indefinite subject drop in intransitive constructions. Consequently, we propose a unified analysis of indefinite argument drop. This contributes to a better understanding of the distribution of indefinite argument drop, and also of unaccusative and (analytic and se) passive constructions in Spanish. In particular, our analysis provides further support for analyzing passive se-constructions as being similar to unaccusatives and impersonal se-constructions, as independently claimed in Ormazabal & Romero (2024).
The present paper aims to analyze the properties of Spanish reduplicative coordination (ReCo) within a generative framework. Therefore, it intends to systematically contrast Spanish ReCo with the characterization and predictions made for English by De Vos (2005). English examples as (1.a) show Spanish counterparts as (1.b), suggesting that both languages have parallel syntactic structures involving a conjunction with a similar semantic interpretation: (1) a. (De Vos 2005: 62) My friend Jim Stoltz walks and walks and walks in the wilderness • Mi amigo Jim Stoltz camina y camina y camina en la naturaleza. The Spanish structure in (1.b) represents a case of pseudo-coordination, as De Vos claims for English, since the sentences do not describe two distinct events but only one event of walking which is longer than expected. However, we will try to demonstrate that there are significant differences between Spanish and English in regard to the semantic interpretation of ReCo and to its syntactic distribution with predicates of various Aktionsart classes. These contrasts deserve a detailed analysis, since they are also a symptom of the fact that each language has an essentially distinct syntactic structure, implying, in turn, that De Vos’ proposal is not applicable to Spanish.
This study focuses on an understudied phenomenon in European Spanish: por + topicalized infinitive (= por TI). This pattern is contrasted with the more common bare topicalized infinitive construction (= bare TI), e.g., por comer, come versus comer, come (both of which mean ‘as for eating, s/he eats’). Based on pertinent literature and bolstered by corpus examples, this paper formulates the hypothesis that the por TI variant is preferred in scalar contexts, i.e., combined with scalar focus adverbs such as hasta ‘even’, whereas bare TI is preferred in adversative contexts, i.e., continuations beginning with pero ‘but’. In a forced-choice questionnaire, scalarity and adversativity were manipulated as independent variables and tested against each other. The results show a clear positive correlation between scalarity and the por TI variant, whereas adversativity is not correlated with either variant. Furthermore, the results suggest that por TI is more likely to occur in exaggerated, unexpected, unreal, or hypothetical contexts. These findings are also supported by the answers to a metalinguistic question in the questionnaire.
Spanish has three verb classes, identified by three different theme vowels: -a, e, and -i. The verbs show three different types of paradigm levelling, whereby verb class distinctions are neutralised, either in whole or in part. These three types of levelling interact in a nontrivial manner with patterns of root allomorphy. I analyse both the levellings and the correlations with root allomorphy in terms of the nanosyntactic root size paradigm, which assumes that differences in the size of root are responsible for the choice of the theme vowel. The levellings will be shown to follow from possible variations in root size of verbs internal to a single verb class, causing roots to `shrink', and become the same size as the roots of another verb class. As a result, they behave like the verbs of that other class, giving rise to the levelling phenomenon.
In the generative tradition, the conditions on subextraction (i.e., the extraction from a phrase XP) have been captured by either one of the following incompatible formulations: (i) a formulation based on the notion of phase (the PIC, i.e., the Phase Impenetrability Condition); (ii) a formulation based on the notion of selection and on the configuration in which XP occurs (the subjacency condition). We provide two empirical case studies, both focused on Italian, to test the predictions of formulations (i)-(ii): inverse copular sentences and the complement of quality. Our main finding is that subextraction is naturally accounted for by the subjacency condition, not by the PIC. In this way, this study brings fresh empirical evidence to bear on the role of phases in the theory of locality.
The aim of the present study is to analyze both the form and function of fillers across phonological and syntactic dimensions in first language acquisition, establishing a link between the two domains. The focus of the present investigation lies on preverbal fillers, i.e., target-deviant syllabic or consonantal units filling the subject position, in longitudinal as well as cross-sectional data of multilingual children acquiring French simultaneously to German, Italian or Russian. The data suggest that fillers serve different functions for multilingual and monolingual children, especially if subject realization is considered. Specifically, fillers appear to constitute a strategy employed by monolingual children to express linguistic features whose specific values have not yet been acquired in the target language. Moreover, the analysis of grammatical aspects coded into fillers such as gender, number and person features as well as the consideration of target-deviant subjects reveal substantial differences between the two groups. The findings support the claim that multilingual children display an accelerated acquisition of the non-null-subject property in French compared to their monolingual peers. This leads us to assume that acceleration is a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by an analysis of fillers or of target-deviant subjects, suggesting that multilinguals are able to benefit from their other language, even if this language is parametrically different.
This article investigates as-clauses in Catalan and other Romance languages. It observes that as-clauses can display an overt or canonical realization of the verbal complement or a gap. It argues that, when as-clauses display an overt verbal complement, they are interpreted as manner adjuncts, and when they display a gap in the verbal complement position, they are interpreted as evidential adjuncts. Whereas manner as-clauses in Catalan are analyzed as adverbial relative clauses, it is claimed that evidential as-clauses involve an operator (tal) moving to an A'-position; such an operator abstracts over a propositional variable in the verbal complement position and is coindexed with the matrix clause. This analysis permits to grasp the very deep differences presented by two superficially very similar constructions and to provide a rather simple account of several idiosyncrasies of evidential as-clauses.
This paper shows that differential object marking (DOM) is not a unitary crosslinguistic phenomenon, and observes that its two subtypes, differential object flagging (DOF) and differential object indexing (DOI), probably have rather different explanations. The cross-linguistic patterns found with both subtypes of DOM can be described by the scales of referential prominence (animacy, specificity, and so on), but DOI is like differential subject indexing (DSI) in that it conforms to the prominent indexing universal, while differential subject flagging (DSF) shows the mirror-image pattern of DOF: Flagging is preferred when the subject is not prominent on one of the prominence scales. The paper provides examples from a wide variety of languages showing that indexing behaves rather differently from flagging. Thus, DOM is not a unified phenomenon, as was already noted by Siewierska (2004) and some earlier authors.
This study aims to investigate the extent to which language contact between Italian and Sicilian dialects has facilitated the integration of Differential Object Marking in the Sicilian regional variety of Italian, as compared to the Tuscan variety, which instead displays a limited use of a-marking of the direct object. The phenomenon was analyzed both in adult grammar and from a language acquisition perspective. Sicilian children's behavior was directly compared to that of Tuscan children using the same topic elicitation task from Belletti and Manetti (2019). Additionally, an acceptability judgment task concerning DOM in various syntactic configurations (Topic, Focus, and SVO) was administered to two groups of Italian adults respectively from Tuscany and Sicily. Findings reveal a difference between the two regional varieties of Italian, evident both in adults' and in children's behavior. Specifically, in the Sicilian variety, a-marking does not notably help in resolving complex intervention configurations in featural Relativized Minimality terms (Friedmann, Belletti and Rizzi 2009), suggesting that DOM may already be integrated within the Case-agreement system. Conversely, in the Tuscan variety, prepositional marking appears limited to a-topics, being a peculiarity of left-peripheral Topic positions and helping to ameliorate intervention configurations when the direct object is dislocated in the highest part of the clause.
Even though there were already calls around the turn of the millennium for the heritage languages of learners to be included in foreign-language teaching (e.g., Gogolin 1994, Hu 2003), the acquisition of phonology in the context of migration-induced multilingualism is still an emerging area of research in both linguistics and language pedagogy. Based on recent studies on the acquisition of L3 French and Spanish phonology by heritage bilinguals (e.g., Gabriel et al. 2014/2018/2022, Gr & uuml;nke & Gabriel 2022), it is posited that the acquisition of a foreign language's sound system is enhanced by metalinguistic and phonological awareness. Furthermore, such awareness can be fostered by imparting declarative knowledge regarding the similarities and differences between the languages of the learners' linguistic background and the foreign languages they learn. Whether interventions can foster facilitative transfer from a heritage language onto the target language seems to be contingent upon three factors: (i) the maintenance of the relevant feature in the learner's heritage language, (ii) the degree of activation of the learner's heritage language during the learning process, and (iii) the perceptual salience of the feature at issue. In the light of insights from phonetic learning, we argue that intensive pronunciation training over a longer period is required to support and consolidate the positive, sometimes short-term effects found in the studies.
It has often been observed that parasitic gaps fare better in untensed adjunct clauses than in tensed ones. Garcia Mayo & Kempchinsky (1994) argue that this contrast emerges in Romance languages, but not in English. We present an acceptability judgment experiment to investigate the tense effect in different varieties of French and Spanish, and American English. While the main effects of tense and parasitic gaps in the Romance languages were significant, we did not find super-additivity. We did find super-additivity in the English data, although the experimental design prevents us from comparing the datasets. Our results do not support Garcia Mayo & Kempchinsky's analysis. Furthermore, we compare our results with earlier experiments. We tested different language varieties for the sake of representation, but also because language contact with Germanic languages or Quechuan languages and Shawi may lead to transfer effects, reducing participants' sensitivity to the tense contrast compared to Metropolitan French and European Spanish. The patterns in the Spanish datasets corroborate this hypothesis. Finally, we find variation between the adjunct types we tested in the Romance subexperiments (after-, before-, and without-clauses). Our findings thus provide an empirical basis for future research into the phenomenon.
This study investigates the role of heritage language (HL) speakers in language change, focusing on how they frame motion events compared to native monolingual homeland speakers. Language contact, particularly in HL contexts, is considered a significant factor in driving language variation and change. Drawing on research by Talmy (1975, 1983, 2007), we examine the alternation between verb-framed (VF) and satellite-framed (SF) constructions in Italian, which may be influenced by cross-linguistic contact with SF languages like German. The study reveals that Italian HL speakers produce significantly more SF constructions than homeland speakers, suggesting cross-linguistic influence from the majority language. Additionally, both groups exhibit sensitivity to the semantic properties of Manner verbs, with non-directional Manner verbs eliciting fewer SF constructions than directional Manner verbs. This study investigates the emergence of innovative linguistic forms in bilingual contexts, which may mirror broader patterns of contact-induced language change. Finally, it highlights the importance of exploring variability in both syntactic and semantic domains to better understand which structures are more susceptible to change.
Spanish demonstratives may appear before the noun (este libro 'this book') or after the noun (el libro este 'the book this'). Despite their relevance for comparative syntax (Giusti 1997, 2015, Brug & egrave; 1996, 2002), little work has been done on their meaning. Based on elicitation data, this paper proposes the first formal semantic treatment of the two Spanish constructions, with a particular focus on the lesser studied postnominal demonstrative. The main proposal is that the postnominal is an indexed adjective, i.e. an adjective carrying a "silent pronoun". Additionally, it is argued that the postnominal is a weak demonstrative, unlike its prenominal counterpart, which explains its reduced distribution in deixis. These two points capture previously unexplained differences between the two constructions, as well as another (better understood) alternation in Spanish, namely pre- and postnominal possessives. The paper contributes to the crosslinguistic study of demonstratives by examining an atypical adjectival demonstrative from a semantic lens.
The aim of the present study is to analyze both the form and function of fillers across phonological and syntactic dimensions in first language acquisition, establishing a link between the two domains. The focus of the present investigation lies on preverbal fillers, i.e., target-deviant syllabic or consonantal units filling the subject position, in longitudinal as well as cross-sectional data of multilingual children acquiring French simultaneously to German, Italian or Russian. The data suggest that fillers serve different functions for multilingual and monolingual children, especially if subject realization is considered. Specifically, fillers appear to constitute a strategy employed by monolingual children to express linguistic features whose specific values have not yet been acquired in the target language. Moreover, the analysis of grammatical aspects coded into fillers such as gender, number and person features as well as the consideration of target-deviant subjects reveal substantial differences between the two groups. The findings support the claim that multilingual children display an accelerated acquisition of the non-null-subject property in French compared to their monolingual peers. This leads us to assume that acceleration is a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by an analysis of fillers or of target-deviant subjects, suggesting that multilinguals are able to benefit from their other language, even if this language is parametrically different.
This article is centered on a root-clause usage of Catalan que. It focuses on the meaning the particle contributes to assertions and polar questions. In particular, it proposes that que serves to attribute a commitment to a proposition to the addressee. The article adopts a recent idea from speech act theory that views commitments as social obligations speakers take up when performing speech acts. While most previous work on assertions focuses on speaker’s commitments, the main contribution of que is an (attributed) addressee’s commitment. The effect of que on the dynamics of the conversation are analyzed adopting Malamud and Stephenson’s dynamic framework and a first formal analysis of the expressive meaning of que is developed by drawing from Krifka (2023a) and Gutzmann (2015).
In the generative tradition, the conditions on subextraction (i.e., the extraction from a phrase XP) have been captured by either one of the following incompatible formulations: (i) a formulation based on the notion of phase (the PIC, i.e., the Phase Impenetrability Condition); (ii) a formulation based on the notion of selection and on the configuration in which XP occurs (the subjacency condition). We provide two empirical case studies, both focused on Italian, to test the predictions of formulations (i)-(ii): inverse copular sentences and the complement of quality. Our main finding is that subextraction is naturally accounted for by the subjacency condition, not by the PIC. In this way, this study brings fresh empirical evidence to bear on the role of phases in the theory of locality.
This article investigates as-clauses in Catalan and other Romance languages. It observes that as-clauses can display an overt or canonical realization of the verbal complement or a gap. It argues that, when as-clauses display an overt verbal complement, they are interpreted as manner adjuncts, and when they display a gap in the verbal complement position, they are interpreted as evidential adjuncts. Whereas manner as-clauses in Catalan are analyzed as adverbial relative clauses, it is claimed that evidential as-clauses involve an operator (tal) moving to an A’-position; such an operator abstracts over a propositional variable in the verbal complement position and is coindexed with the matrix clause. This analysis permits to grasp the very deep differences presented by two superficially very similar constructions and to provide a rather simple account of several idiosyncrasies of evidential as-clauses.
This paper examines insubordinate que-clauses in European Portuguese (EP) and Peninsular Spanish (PS), focusing on their syntactic and discursive properties. The study presents novel data from EP, a language less studied in this context, and contributes to the Syntax/Discourse interface approach. The authors investigate various aspects of insubordination, including contexts of use, pragmatic values, and types of linguistic expressions associated with these structures. The research reveals that EP insubordinate que-clauses demonstrate less independence than their PS counterparts, maintaining a strong connection with the standard embedding que complementizer. Their discursive value is primarily inferred from situational or pragmatic contexts, often relying on anchors such as juxtaposed preceding sentences or initial interjections. The findings of this work contribute to challenge the strict distinction between syntactic and discourse relations in natural language.
