Fronting in Old Spanish

Montserrat Batllori,Ioanna Sitaridou

doi:10.5334/gjgl.893

Abstract

The article focuses on a cross-genre study of fronting phenomena in 13th Century Old Spanish. In particular, we study stage topics and deictic fronting, fronting in quotative inversion, quantifier fronting and information/broad/weak focus fronting comparatively, for the first time, in three types of texts (that is, (a) Cantar de Mío Cid, (b) La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, and (c) Estoria de España and General Estoria) while we compare with equivalent judgements from Modern Spanish in order to establish what exactly has changed. “Fronting” a term which has been used to describe all sorts of configurations ranging from stylistic fronting to focus fronting to non-focus fronting receives here a principled discussion. We show that, overall, fronting with a verum focus interpretation has largely been preserved into Modern Spanish, albeit often restricted, while the most notable change seems to be the loss of a preverbal focus position conveying broad focus. In doing so, we reconcile Leonetti’s (2017) claims for an informational partition, which does not divide the fronted element from the verb, but, rather, the fronted element together with the verb from the postverbal subject with our own claims about the syntactic mechanisms which yield this partition. We proceed to conclude that fronting operations are not a derivative of the V2 parameter being operative (contra Wolfe 2015).

Highlights

In this paper, we examine three types of Old Spanish texts and compare data involving fronting against Modern Spanish native judgements in order to find out to what extent the different types of fronting in Old Spanish texts are still possible in Modern Spanish.Fronting corresponds to different syntactic configurations and various discourse readings, namely: stylistic fronting, fronted stage topics, deictic fronting, fronting in quotative inversion, quantifier fronting, scrambling, clitic left dislocation and focus fronting be it contrastive or informational
Our findings show that (a) in neither Old nor Modern Spanish all stage topics are in spec-TP, but that some may be generated in the left periphery; (b) deictic fronting is neither focus nor topic: while it refers to something previously mentioned, it is used in order to elevate the referent to a higher level of salience, it cannot be said to be entirely non-focal; (c) fronting in quotative inversion has remained stable; (d) only one type of quantifier fronting has survived whilst
We have shown the existence of deictic fronting in the data of Mío Cid: (12) a. (Cid), which is the Old Spanish text in which fronting seems to reach maximal exponence

Summary

Introduction

Regarding the preposing of locative adverbs with unaccusative verbs and existential estar ‘be’ (from 11a to 11c), the examples of GE&EE seem to pattern with Modern Spanish, except for the fact that the subject is not always adjacent to the verb These cases might be analysed the same way as Modern Spanish stage topics (in Spec-TP position). The only register variation found in the 13th C. texts that we have examined relates to the fact that in Mío Cid preverbal temporal, locative, manner adverbs and other deictic expressions move to the left periphery and we may say that even if they are not focal they may convey information focus, which could be checked in a position external to FinP/TP because it triggers proclisis. 23 Consider cases where the adverbs do not move to the left periphery, as in (i)-(ii):

Quotative inversion in Old Spanish

Quantifier fronting

Diachronic implications and conclusion