Dialectal variation in the expression of &lt;i&gt;que&lt;/i&gt; in &lt;i&gt;sí-que&lt;/i&gt; ‘yes that’ contexts across Spanish: The case of some Latin American Spanish varieties

Julio Villa-García,Raquel González Rodríguez

doi:10.5334/gjgl.1186

Abstract

This paper investigates dialectal microvariation across the Spanish-speaking world in terms of the presence/absence of que in sí-que contexts. The function of this construction is to signal the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition. In this connection, we argue that the syntactic account recently proposed by Villa-García &amp; González Rodríguez (2020) for polarity-encoding sí ‘yes’ on the one hand and for sí-que ‘yes that’ sequences in Iberian Spanish on the other readily extends to a number of Latin American varieties where que in sí que is syntactically present albeit unpronounced (i.e., sí Ø/que), although it can be overt as well. We provide a variety of syntactic arguments together with Phonetic-Form- and Logical-Form-related arguments to this effect, and show that the dialectal split brought to light here is consonant with a view of (micro-)variation whereby Phonetic Form spellout plays a key role (Barbiers 2009; Rizzi 2013; Rizzi &amp; Bocci 2017; inter alia).

Highlights

The particle sí ‘yes’ and the sequence sí que ‘yes that’ have been deemed interchangeable in constructions such as the ones illustrated in (1), which prima facie do not appear to involve syntactic or semantic differences (e.g., Carbonero Cano 1980: 167; Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal 2009: 200; RAE-ASALE 2009: 3004).(1) a
We argue that the syntactic account recently proposed by Villa-García & González Rodríguez (2020) for polarity-encoding sí ‘yes’ on the one hand and for sí-que ‘yes that’ sequences in Iberian Spanish on the other readily extends to a number of Latin American varieties where que in sí que is syntactically present albeit unpronounced, it can be overt as well
We show that some Latin American varieties permit (3) without que, which amounts to saying that such varieties exhibit a version of sí que where que is physically absent, effectively making it superficially identical to polarity-encoding-sí sentences in certain environments

Summary

Introduction

The particle sí ‘yes’ and the sequence sí que ‘yes that’ have been deemed interchangeable in constructions such as the ones illustrated in (1), which prima facie do not appear to involve syntactic or semantic differences (e.g., Carbonero Cano 1980: 167; Leonetti & Escandell-Vidal 2009: 200; RAE-ASALE 2009: 3004). Art. 99, page 5 of 20 option would be to identify this projection with AssertiveP, a projection proposed by Ambar (2002) According to this author, AssertiveP is the projection in which metalinguistic negative particles are placed (see Villa-García & González Rodríguez 2020, for parallels between the elements assumed to occur in AssertiveP and sí que). AssertiveP is the projection in which metalinguistic negative particles are placed (see Villa-García & González Rodríguez 2020, for parallels between the elements assumed to occur in AssertiveP and sí que) Ambar argues that this projection is located between TopicP and FocusP, which fits in with the proposal in (7). Since sí in this account is assumed to be a focal polarity particle in FocusP, in principle we should be able to find occurrences of the sí-que-sí sequence This prediction is corroborated by the following data, akin to those reported in Villa-García & González Rodríguez (2020). We turn to the novel dialect data that constitute the object of study of this paper.

Dialectal variation

Back to sí que in the relevant Latin American varieties

Conclusion