Abstract
This article presents the main facts about how information structure is syntactically codified in Spanish, with particular attention to the syntax of topics and foci. These facts will be used to assess whether cartographic and minimalist approaches can, in their pure version, account precisely for this set of facts in a predictive way. We discuss the taxonomy of topics and foci, the evidence for their syntactic position, their A’-movement properties, the asymmetries between left- and right-dislocated elements, and the availability of information structure inside subordinate clauses.
Highlights
Introduction and overviewThe goal of this article is to provide an overview of the main properties of complementisers in Spanish, with particular attention to information structure: what the empirical facts are, and what are the analyses that have dealt with these facts
We will not get into this distinction here, noting that the two proposals might be talking about two sides of the same phenomenon: while the categorical/thetic proposal refers to the linguistic material present in a structure and its grammatical and linguistic status, where there are relevant differences, the ‘no-utterance-lacks-topic’ proposal discusses more the flow of information from a cognitive perspective, highlighting the fact that nobody talks about things in the vacuum, but at the very least with an utterance tries to say something about the world as it is conceived in his or her mind at that point
As in the case of topics, it seems that foci should be viewed as cognitive categories whose linguistic reflection is not direct
Summary
Focalised DO the room has decorated Juan c) complementisers are associated to utterances in several ways, as they define the illocutionary force of the clause, defining contrasts such as those in (4), and are the locus of utterance-, speaker- and addressee-oriented adverbs (5). What we see in this list is that complementisers are the main objects that syntacticians use to account for the properties of the clause that lie at the interface between syntax and pragmatics: the management of the flow of information, manifested through word order, the definition of speech acts and the introduction of speaker and hearer attitude towards the utterance or the act of uttering it. Whenever the definition of illocutionary force becomes relevant for word order, information structure and the formal properties of the clause, we will make reference to this third role. The main proponent of this view for complementiser phenomena is Rizzi (1997), and has been developed in a number of proposals, some of them by Rizzi himself (cf. Rizzi 2004, for instance), some by others (Haegeman 2011). (8) represents the proposal in Rizzi (1997), while (9) represents the proposal of Haegeman (2006)
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