Reconsidering the syntax of interrogatives in Caribbean Spanish. With especial reference to Dominican Spanish

Michael Zimmermann

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.57

Abstract

This paper readdresses one of the most conspicuous syntactic traits of varieties of Caribbean Spanish that has been on the research agenda ever since its detection almost a hundred years ago: the preverbal occurrence of subjects in interrogatives with a simple non-subject argumental wh-expression. In an attempt to shed more light on the still highly controversial issues of the frequency of whSV order and the kind(s) of preverbal subject, the paper initially gathers relevant claims as well as examples from the literature and then presents pertinent results from a refined large-scale quantitative analysis of natural speech from colloquial Dominican Spanish, hereby filling a long-standing lacuna. Additionally, the paper discusses previous approaches, showing that none of these are free from problems. Drawing on relevant aspects of earlier approaches and building on insights into the fairly related state of affairs in medieval French, the paper eventually argues that whSV order in Dominican, and by extension, other pertinent varieties of Caribbean Spanish, follows from ongoing morpho-syntactic changes that are taken to ultimately result in the resetting of the null subject parameter: the development of a paradigm of weak subject pronouns, the concomitant establishment of a dedicated subject position, SpecTP, and the overall strong tendency towards SV order.

Highlights

From the results presented one may conclude that non-inversion of the subject and the verb in direct simple argumental wh-interrogatives was a fairly restricted word order young adult speakers of colloquial Dominican Spanish in the late 1920s produced with the pronouns tú and usted in around 1 out of 2 and 4 cases, respectively
On the basis of a refined quantitative analysis of a large-scale corpus of natural speech from colloquial Dominican Spanish, which is contemporaneous to the first mention of whSV order in the literature, it has been shown that, in the late 1920s, non-inversion of the subject and the verb in direct wh-interrogatives (i) is possible only with tú and usted, (ii) ranges in frequency from 27.3% to 71.4%, depending on the argumental nature of the wh-expression, and (iii) is exclusively produced by young adult speakers
The corpus findings have been taken indicative of the innovative nature of such word order in colloquial Dominican Spanish, whose origins arguably date back to the late 19th century

Summary

Introduction

In Spanish, a null-subject language with fairly free word order, (direct as well as indirect) interrogatives with a (fronted) simple (non-subject) argumental wh-expression generally stand out due to obligatory inversion of the (overt) subject and the verb.* As illustrated in (1), such interrogatives have compulsory whVS order, as first established in Núñez Cedeño (1983) and Torrego (1984) (cf. Hadlich 1971; Otheguy 1973; Solé & Solé 1977). To the best of my knowledge, there is but a single diachronic analysis of a fairly limited extent by Granda (1991), who, on the basis of an extract from a prose work of colloquial Dominican Spanish dating from the second half of the 18th century, reports no instances of whSV order with simple argumental whinterrogatives. Still, such word order is encountered in earlier stages of Peninsular Spanish (Lapesa 1992; RAE 2009b). Latin and pre-modern Peninsular Spanish do not match completely, since, unlike the former, the latter exhibits whSV order in indirect simple argumental wh-interrogatives only (Lapesa 1992)

Previous investigations into whSV order in varieties of Caribbean Spanish

Previous approaches to whSV order in varieties of Caribbean Spanish

An alternative approach to whSV order in varieties of Caribbean Spanish

Findings

Conclusion