On the Contrasts Between sí ‘yes’ and sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish and the Structure of the Complementizer Phrase Domain

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to account for a host of old and novel syntactic contrasts between the emphatic polarity particle sí ‘yes’ and its putative counterpart with an instance of the complementizer que –sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish. Even though the two constructions appear to be synonymous in certain contexts, closer inspection reveals that the two elements display a number of non-trivial asymmetries in their behavior and distribution and convey different meanings. We thus argue that the two elements should be treated differently. Building on Hernanz (2007 and subsequent work), we propose that sí, which marks focal positive polarity, i.e., verum focus, originates in ΣP and then moves to FocusP. By contrast, sí que is directly merged in a projection below TopicP but higher than FocusP in the left periphery, does not encode polarity, and instead renders the meaning that the speaker is extremely confident about the propositional content, be it positive or negative. We argue that sí que involves more CP structure than sí, which makes a variety of correct empirical predictions.