No lo he visto ‘masque’ yo?

Borja Herce

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.148

Abstract

This paper shows that Spanish ‘más que’ (lit. more than) is much more than a comparative construction synchronically. Phonological, syntactic, and semantic evidence shows that various grammatically different entities hide under this single spelling. The most prominent of these is a (phonologically unstressed) negative polarity item with a meaning “only” or “just”. By means of robust synchronic and diachronic corpus evidence, this paper explores its morphosyntactic properties and geographic distribution in the modern language, as well as when and how a comparative expression with no polarity associations could come to grammaticalize into a negative polarity item.

Highlights

This paper was inspired by a disagreement between a language-learning app's expectations, and the author's native speaker knowledge of Spanish
Introspection and the grammaticality judgments (1-9) that have been presented in Section 1 need to be complemented with other data to obtain a clearer picture of the contemporary situation with regards to ‘masque’ at the community level
The expression, maybe as a result of its contemporary semantics and its morphosyntactic requirements, seems to disprefer agent roles, and appears to have specialized for introducing new information, a fact which is concomitantly associated with the greater occurrence of the expression in patient roles, and with indefinite noun phrases, which often provide or include a quantification or measure phrase

Summary

Introduction

This paper was inspired by a disagreement between a language-learning app's expectations, and the author's native speaker knowledge of Spanish. In the examples presented so far, ‘masque’ seems to be straightforwardly translatable or replaceable by an adverb (e.g. Sp. solo, Eng. only): ‘only two doctors’ (1), ‘only a priest’ (3), ‘only at night (4)’, ‘only the first match’ (5), 'only Spanish' (6b), etc Unlike these adverbs, ‘masque’ must occur under the scope of negation, as we have shown in (3-9), it is phonologically unstressed, and it must precede the element it has scope over (see 9b, paraphrasable as 'talking to you is the only thing (s)he refuses to do' vs 9b 'you are the only person (s)he refuses to talk to').

Synchrony

Diachrony

Findings

Conclusions