Spanish Constructions Research Articles

Corpus-based functionality and translatability

This paper reports on a descriptive study of English and Spanish progressive constructions to identify degrees of common functionality and, therefore, translatability. Here, the functionality of the resource under study is examined contrastively, in order to observe functional correspondences which can be considered translation equivalents. In addition, a descriptive study of actual translations provides a broader picture of the degree of translatability between the languages under investigation. To this end, a corpus-based approach has been adopted to account for language usage in a cross-linguistic setting. Two complementary types of corpora have been used, a comparable corpus made up of BoE and CREA, and the ACTRES Parallel Corpus. The result constitutes a comprehensive approach to language description oriented towards application.

Real tense and real aspect in mirativity

The goal of this paper is an account of the role of tense and aspect in mirative constructions in Spanish. I propose that the past tense morphology and the imperfect/perfect morphology in Spanish miratives contribute their standard meanings to the semantics of mirativity. I define mirativity as the clash between the speaker’s previous beliefs and the current state of affairs asserted by the proposition. I propose a M operator that relates the speaker’s beliefs and the proposition by ranking the worlds in which the proposition doesn’t hold in the speaker’s previous beliefs as better ones. The past tense is interpreted outside the proposition, and constitutes the time argument of the modal base (doxastic domain). Aspect gets its usual interpretation in the proposition but also in the alternative propositions that order the worlds in the modal base. This way, differences regarding the imperfect mirative and the pluperfect one are accounted for. Finally, the paper also discusses stative miratives, which apparently challenge part of the analysis. I claim that these are not counter examples, but rather confirmation of the analysis, once we account for the interaction between miratives, statives and lifetime effects.

Recomplementation and locality of movement in Spanish

Abstract The paper investigates recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer) constructions in Spanish and provides a number of arguments in favor of analyzing secondary que as the head of TopicP in the left periphery. The paper further examines left-dislocated phrases occurring between overt complementizers and lays out the proposal that sandwiched dislocates are not moved into but merged in the specifier of TopicP, which is headed by secondary que (or its null counterpart). Likewise, it is shown that extraction across double-que constructions is prevented by locality of movement (i.e. any movement operation across secondary que is illicit). The paper argues that the locality effects induced by movement across secondary que are reminiscent of the notorious English Comp-t phenomenon. Drawing on the Rescue-by-PF-Deletion analysis of the ameliorating effect of ellipsis on island violations, the paper provides an account of the contrast between ungrammatical sentences displaying extraction across secondary que and their grammatical counterparts without it.

The pronominal coding of the patient in reflexive indefinite agent constructions in Peninsular Spanish

This paper is concerned with the pronominalization of the patient in reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals in Peninsular Spanish. It is commonly agreed that only human patients can pronominalize in these contexts in Standard Peninsular Spanish. However, some varieties show full pronominalization of non-human patients. This paper aims to describe the geographical distribution of this pronominalization in Peninsular Spanish, together with the evolution of this phenomenon. Dialectal data allow describing the evolution of linguistic phenomena by means of investigating their geographical spreading in different contexts. The data contained in this paper show that the pronominalization of the patient in reflexive indefinite agent constructions (namely, reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals) is related to the animacy hierarchy, connecting this phenomenon with the more general category of agreement.

Stages of grammaticalization of causative verbs and constructions in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian

The article shows that analytic causative constructions are more grammaticalized in French and Italian than in Spanish and Portuguese, both in meaning (semantic bleaching of the verb ‘to make’) and in synthesis (structural event integration). It is pointed out, moreover, that Italian fare + infinitive is semantically and structurally more grammaticalized than French faire + infinitive, and that the emergence of the inflected infinitive in the clausal complements of causative and perception verbs in Portuguese has made the Portuguese causative constructions less integrated, and thus less grammaticalized, than the Spanish ones. The conclusion of this study is that there exists a decreasing continuum of grammaticalization of causative constructions in Romance languages, that starts with Italian and goes on to French, Spanish and Portuguese, in that order.

Poniendo de manifiesto: Spanish light verb constructions in Latin American newspapers

This study investigates Spanish light verb constructions (LVCs), or construcciones con verbo soporte, such as dar respuesta and tomar en cuenta in a seven-million-word corpus of contemporary newspaper texts from seven Latin American countries. I provide a detailed discussion of the procedure of compiling the corpus to ensure a balanced representation of newspaper registers. This is followed by a description of how the targeted verbs, dar, poner, tener and tomar, were identified and tagged using corpus analysis software. The results of the corpus search are analysed in terms of frequency, and selected morphosyntactic and textual features, such as the distance between components, tense, number and mood of the light verb, adjectival modification, article use, complex LVCs, and the occurrence of multiple LVCs. The results, supported by numerous examples in Spanish from the corpus, provide further evidence of the wide variation in form and use found among many LVCs.

"He esperado", "he vuelto" y "he vivido": su valor semántico en el español de México

Fecha de recepción: 27 de mayo de 2010.Fecha de aceptación: 4 de marzo de 2011. A partir de estudios precedentes de otros autores y del análisis de datos empíricos, se propone una descripción del valor semántico de formas verbales del tipo he esperado, he vuelto y he vivido, en el español de México. El análisis se fundamenta en la relación existente entre interpretaciones contextuales y el valor semántico en el que ellas se basan. Con el fin de argumentar a favor del valor semántico que se propone, se muestra su relación con las interpretaciones contextuales y se sugiere que dicho valor semántico podría ser la base de una extensión de uso que se ha desarrollado en la España continental.

The HISPACAT comparative database of syntactic constructions and its applications to syntactic variation research

The HISPACAT database of syntactic constructions in Catalan and Spanish is a dynamic comparative grammar of two closely related languages, which, from a theoretical point of view, offers us a alternative viewpoint to advance in our understanding of the ``atoms'' of linguistic microvariation, and to offer a snapshot of microparametric (in)variance, which will help us to predict less stable parts of the grammar, and hence more sensitive to syntactic change or interference phenomena. Moreover, this tool, which is conceived as a major empirical source for testing syntactic microvariation, may also prove helpful for researchers in bilingualism and language contact studies, and for teachers and students of Catalan or Spanish as L2.

Composites in the Spanish Heritage: Designs and Rehabilitations in Prototipical Models as "Las Aguzaderas" Castle

“Las Aguzaderas” Castle is a beautiful example of Spanish military constructions. We wish a general methodology for the modelizacion and performance in this prototypical castle, to use for its application not only in him, but in other many existing ones which they respond to this same pattern, with great intertest. Stone blocks creating powerful walls, only perforated by little hollows (doors, arrow-windows, etc). The stone’s mechanical characteristics well are known. The simple form of the elements bases, make possible the profuse use of numerical methods, when working with discretitations of elements type “brick”. Others elements more complex (vaults, cupolas, abutments, doors, etc.) can easily also modelized and be discretized. The analysis that provides the indicated methodology to us, to find pathologies in this castle, with which we could make the Integral Rehabilitation Plan, in special with composites, armed with fibers (E glass, kevlar and carbon).

Les localisateurs dans les constructions existentielles : Approche comparée en espagnol, en français et en italien

Les localisateurs dans les constructions existentielles : Approche comparée en espagnol, en français et en italien

Double Negatives, Present Absences and Other No-Nos: Dialogic Community Action in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God

Ana Castillo's So Far From God works to reconcile a multiplicity of civic and cultural institutions that compete for prominence in the American Southwest, a region marked by diverse social and linguistic practices. Amerindian and Chicano cultures, for example, confront their marginalization amidst mainstream economic orders, competing religious dogmas and models of civic government. The resulting intercultural synthesis—endemic to the physical and psychological regions Gloria Anzaldúa defines as “the Borderlands”—surfaces in the narrator’s language, which marks her as a non-native speaker of so-called Standard American English. Abundant double negatives and other quirks in her speech conform to conventional Spanish constructions; as such, they give voice to ambiguous, doubly-spoken utterances that can be instructively analyzed in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of dialogic discourse. As we will see, such linguistic complexity harbors an empowering capacity to engage lived experience by renaming it; wielded effectively, it may usefully contest and revise conventional patriarchal and socio-economic paradigms that would otherwise restrict human agency. Characters may employ dialogic discourse to speak new realities, in a sense. This reality-making—the naming of that which was formerly inexpressible—finds powerful activation in the narrator’s unique sensibility, the arrival, perhaps, of “a new mestiza consciousness” that Anzaldúa announces in her work (77). In So Far From God, mourning mother and activist Sofi follows the narrator’s model to rise as la mayor. In this role, her dialogically expressed mestiza consciousness uses cross-language complexity to subvert the powerful systems that have conditioned Tome’s poverty and dysfunction. Meanwhile, Sofi’s daughter, la Fe, fails to successfully voice such a challenge and finds herself relegated to a position of impotent exclusion.

Datibo osagarri bitxiak eta Datiboaren Lekualdatzea: "ari nai diyot" eta "kanta egin nazu" bidegurutzean

Under certain conditions, nonstandard varieties of Basque display so-called quirky dative objects, a phenomenon that belongs to the broader family of constructions studied in the typological literature as Differential Object Marking (DOM). For the most part, Basque grammarians have either ignored the phenomenon, or set it aside with suspicion or disparagement. In this paper we seek to redress this gap. First, we describe the main properties of quirky dative objects in Basque, and delimit the range of variation across varieties. Second, we compare it to similar DOM constructions in Spanish (leismo) and Hindi-Urdu (-ko marking). Last, we analyze its syntactic properties and claim that Basque quirky dative objects should be viewed as true direct objects rather than as indirect objects. Our discussion compares quirky dative objects with the phenomenon of dative displacement, another little-known source of nonstandard variation in the language.

<i>The acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition Mihaela Pirvulescu Silvina A. Montrul. 2004. The acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition. In the series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 37. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 411. US$63.00 (softcover). In this book, the acquisition of Spanish is viewed from three perspectives: monolingual first language (L1) acquisition, bilingual acquisition by children, and adult second language (L2) acquisition. The focus is on the structural aspects of language acquisition, namely morphology, syntax, and some aspects of lexical semantics. The goal of this book, written within the generative framework, is to support the hypothesis that Universal Grammar guides and constrains all instances of language acquisition. Spanish data is used throughout the book to support the Continuity Hypothesis in all instances of language acquisition. The book is organized into six chapters, each focusing on a specific grammatical theme: morphosyntax of the noun phrase (Chapter 2), morphosyntax of the verb phrase (Chapter 3), the pronominal domain (Chapter 4), the complementizer domain (Chapter 5), and lexical aspects of verb meaning (Chapter 6). The introduction gives an overview of the basic assumptions within the generative theory of language acquisition as well as a guide to basic research questions in the various types of acquisition (L1, bilingual, and L2). Each chapter begins with a review of the relevant Spanish constructions and the associated theoretical assumptions. Studies undertaken on each topic are then discussed in detail and the results reproduced in table form. A good number of examples are provided and where necessary the experimental procedures are explained at length. The empirical base comes from various studies and comprises naturalistic as well as experimental data. Different hypotheses are critically discussed and compared. Chapter 1, “Theoretical foundations”, introduces the basic concepts of Universal Grammar and the general approach to the acquisition of language that it implies. The main theoretical questions that arise for L1, bilingual, and L2 acquisition are presented in turn and they are contrasted with alternative positions that frame the debate: Continuity versus Non-continuity in L1 acquisition; the initial state in bilingual development within the Initial Unitary System versus the Language Differentiation Hypothesis; full, partial or no access to UG and the role of L1 in L2 acquisition. A brief overview of the general characteristics of Spanish grammar is given at the end of this chapter. Chapter 2, “Morphosyntax of the noun phrase”, discusses some aspects of the development of the DP category such as initial representation of the determiners, gender and number agreement, and noun-drop. Using studies comparing German, Spanish, and Basque, the chapter concludes that the determiner category is acquired early on both by Spanish children and by adult L2 learners. Chapter 3, “Morphosyntax of the verb phrase”, focuses on the acquisition of finiteness, tense, aspect, and mood. Comparative data is used to show that verbal inflections emerge early in Spanish children, favouring the Continuity Hypothesis in L1 and bilingual acquisition. A comparative discussion of Spanish, Basque, and English supports the observation that root infinitives are not a uniform phenomenon across languages. The author draws on evidence from [End Page 182] all types of acquisition in order to establish that functional categories expressing tense, aspect, and agreement are present in early grammars and that L2 learners are capable of acquiring them. Chapter 4, “Subject and object pronouns”, presents the main issues surrounding the acquisition of pronouns: null subjects and objects, clitic doubling, and binding. Data show that subject and object pronouns appear early on and that children become quickly aware of the pragmatic distribution of null and overt subjects. The chapter contains a detailed discussion of the acquisition of Principle B of the binding theory as well as a comparison among different Spanish dialects concerning the development of pronouns and their interpretation. In the section on bilingual and L2 development, a variety of languages are investigated, including French, English, Basque, Korean, Cantonese, Danish, and Swedish. Chapter 5, “Topics, questions, embedding, and movement”, discusses the development of the CP structure with evidence from imperatives, subject-verb inversion in questions and wh-movement. The data comes...

Encoding Information Structure via Object Agreement in Spanish Interactions

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The family of object-related depictives in English and Spanish: towards a usage-based constructionist analysis

Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba cogitandi (e.g. “considerar”/“consider”, “encontrar”/“find”, etc.) in English and Spanish. Building on Gonzálvez-García [Gonzálvez-García, F., 2006a. Passives without Actives: Evidence from Verbless Complement Constructions in Spanish. Constructions SV1-5/2006; Gonzálvez-García, F., 2003. Reconstructing object complements in English and Spanish. In: Martínez Vázquez, M. (Eds.), Gramática de Construcciones (Contrastes entre el Inglés y el Español). Grupo de Gramática Contrastiva, Huelva, pp. 17–58], these configurations are argued to be constructions in their own right, viz. the subjective–transitive construction. The main focus of this paper is on the investigation of the most salient semantico-pragmatic hallmarks of four lower-level configurations of the subjective–transitive construction in the light of coercion [Michaelis, L.A., 2003a. Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In: Cuyckens, H., Dirven, R., Taylor, J., (Eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 163–209; Michaelis, L.A., 2003b. Headless constructions and coercion by construction. In: Francis, E., Michaelis, L.A., (Eds.), Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. CSLI, Stanford, pp. 259–310; Michaelis, L.A., 2004a. Type shifting in construction grammar: an integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15 (1), 1–67; Michaelis, L.A., 2004b. Why we believe that syntax is construction-based. Unpublished plenary delivered at the Third International Conference on Construction Grammar(s), Université de Provence, Marseille, July 9, 2004.] via (i) obligatory reflexive pronouns in the object slot, (ii) a progressive verb form with an inherently stative situation/state of affairs, (iii) an imperative verb with a prima facie non-controllable situation/state of affairs, and (iv) an imperfect tense with a counterfactual interpretation. It is shown that while the first three types of coercion are observable in both English and Spanish, type (iv) points to an interesting asymmetry between these two languages, thus lending further credence to the assumption that argument structure is construction-specific as well as language-specific. Moreover, it is demonstrated that these configurations can be aptly regarded as a family of constructions and that a non-monotonic, default inheritance system of the type invoked in the cognitively-influenced strand of Construction Grammar [Goldberg, A.E., 1995. Constructions. A Construction Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London; Goldberg, A.E., 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press, New York] can capture the commonalities and the idiosyncratic particulars of these conventional extensions in the construct-i-con.

Integración conceptual (blending) en el proceso de gramaticalización de construcciones nominales cuantificativas en español

Abstract The primary purpose of this article is to examine the cognitive underpinnings of grammaticalization processes that generate quantifier noun constructions in Spanish. This analysis aims to demonstrate the need to develop a cognitive model of grammaticalization based on the Theory of Blending. Grammaticalization is thus considered a specific case of blending. The main argument sustaining this position lies in the emergent properties of the constructions that result from grammaticalization processes. Finally, a framework for such a model is outlined and its comparative advantages vis-à-vis other cognitive models of grammaticalization proffered in the literature are explained.

Los pronombres reflexivos clíticos como operadores de destransitivación en español

Desde la perspectiva de la gramática funcional, en este artículo se describen las construcciones reflexivas, recíprocas, pasivas con se, medias, impersonales con se y antipasivas del español como el resultado de una operación de ajuste de valencia. Se propone que la finalidad fundamental de esta operación es la destransitivación de la cláusula. Semánticamente, esta destransitivación se logra fusionando en un mismo argumento al agente y al paciente (reflexivas propias, recíprocas), degradando al agente (reflexivas opcionales, reflexivas inherentes, pasivas con se, impersonales con se, medias, antipasivas) o degradando aun más al paciente (reflexivas opcionales, antipasivas). Formalmente, en todas estas construcciones, se utiliza la misma estrategia morfológica: el uso de pronombres flexivos clíticos o de una partícula idéntica al pronombre reflexivo clítico de 3° persona (se).

‘Saved by the reflexive’

This paper argues for the existence of a dynamic interaction between constructional polysemy and coercion in shaping lower-level configurations of the subjective-transitive construction in English and Spanish. In particular, a fine-grained analysis is provided of those configurations featuring coercion via a reflexive pronoun in the object slot. The corpus-based analysis provided here shows that the verbs in question, regardless of their inherent lexical semantics, are construed in this construction as expressing a personal assessment by the subject/speaker about himself/herself, thus providing incontrovertible evidence for a constructionist analysis of the type invoked here. Moreover, the coercion effects examined here lend further credence to the construction-specific and also language-specific nature of constructions, especially in the light of instances of the reflexive subjective-transitive construction after saber (‘know’) in Spanish. This paper also suggests that the explanatory power of the anatomy of a given construction can be further maximized if the morphosyntactic properties of the XPCOMP are mapped onto their inherent meaning properties.

Constructional meanings of verb–noun compounds in Spanish: Limpiabotas vs. tientaparedes

This study examines Spanish [Verb + Noun (V + N)] compounds based on insights drawn from Construction Grammar. In contrast to previous studies that treat Spanish [V + N] compounds as having one common structural and semantic property, this study proposes two types of [V + N] compound constructions in Spanish, each with its own respective constructional meaning. It argues that the acceptability, or the lack thereof, of Spanish [V + N] compounds is not based solely on the individual lexical items that constitute the compounds or the mere composition of those items, but the two constructions that sanction individual occurrences. In the case of a compound with multiple meanings and multiple compounds expressing one meaning, the interaction between constructional meanings and item-specific knowledge about individual instances is shown to be relevant as well.

DOUBLE OBJECTS IN SPANISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE: Acquisition of Morphosyntax and Semantics

This experimental study on the acquisition of the double-object construction in Spanish as a second language (L2) by a group of first language (L1) English adults investigates the role of Universal Grammar (UG) and its interaction with L1 in two modules of grammar: morphosyntax and semantics. The double-object construction in Spanish differs from its English counterpart in its morphosyntactic properties (case, clitic doubling, word order) and its semantics (interpretation of arguments and restrictions on the construction). Results show that L2 learners are sensitive to most of the morphosyntactic properties of the double-object construction but lag behind in the acquisition of its semantics. The experimental group shows evidence of UG-constrained acquisition in their sensitivity to morphosyntactic properties not instantiated in their L1 as well as in their nontarget but UG-licit analysis of the semantic restrictions of Spanish double objects. The dissociation between level of knowledge of morphosyntax and of semantics suggests that modularity of grammar is reflected in SLA exactly as it is in L1 acquisition.I am extremely grateful to Suzanne Flynn, Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, Andrew Stringfellow, Laura Colantoni, and Ana Teresa Perez-Leroux for their generous assistance in terms of comments, encouragement, sharing of materials, and statistical analyses. I also want to thank the teachers and students that participated in the study as well as three anonymous SSLA reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.