Abstract
In Romance, Focus Fronting (FF) is generally related to a contrastive or corrective function. In this paper, I show that Spanish may resort to FF to express a special evaluative meaning, namely, a mirative (conventional) implicature of surprise and unexpectedness. Mirative FF is problematic for the traditional analyses of FF because it is not necessarily contrastive and does not guarantee the traditional articulation of the sentence into a new and a given part. The results of a syntactic experiment on the distribution and interpretation of FF in European Spanish show that speakers accept FF not only in the corrective but also in the mirative context. The acceptability of mirative FF thus proves that FF in Spanish is not exclusively limited to contrast or linked to information-structural requirements such as the new-old information distinction. FF may also be used to express a mirative implicature that requires a set of focal alternatives in order to be interpreted correctly.
References
Abels, Klaus. 2012. The Italian left periphery: A view from locality. Linguistic Inquiry 43(2). 229–254.10.1162/LING_a_00084Search in Google Scholar
Adli, Aria. 2011a. A heuristic mathematical approach for modeling constraint cumulativity: Contrastive focus in Spanish and Catalan. The Linguistic Review 28. 111–173.10.1515/tlir.2011.004Search in Google Scholar
Adli, Aria. 2011b. On the relation between acceptability and frequency. In Esther Rinke & Tanja Kupisch (eds.), The development of grammar: Language acquisition and diachronic change. In honour of Jürgen M. Meisel, 383–404. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/hsm.11.20adlSearch in Google Scholar
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 2001. Inversion as focalization. In Aafke Hulk & Jean-Yves Pollock (eds.), Subject inversion in Romance and the theory of Universal Grammar, 60–90. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 2004. Aspects of the low IP area. In Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of IP and CP. The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 2. 16–51. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina. to appear. Spelling out focus chains and wh-chains: The case of Italian. Syntax.10.1111/synt.12173Search in Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina & Giuliano Bocci. 2012. Should I stay or should I go? Optional focus movement in Italian. In Christopher Piñon (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics, vol. 9. 1–18. http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss9/.Search in Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci & Silvio Cruschina. 2015. Focus fronting and its implicatures. In Enoch Aboh (ed.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2013, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/rllt.8.01biaSearch in Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci & Silvio Cruschina. 2016. Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures. Semantics and Pragmatics 9(3). 1–54.10.3765/sp.9.3Search in Google Scholar
Bobalijk, Jonathan D. & Susi Wurmbrand. 2012. Word order and scope: Transparent interfaces and the ¾ signature. Linguistic Inquiry 43. 371–421.10.1162/LING_a_00094Search in Google Scholar
Bocci, Giuliano. 2013. The syntax-prosody interface: A cartographic perspective with evidence from Italian. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.204Search in Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Robert Freidin, Carlos P. Otero & María-Luisa Zubizarreta (eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic theory, 133–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam, Ángel J. Gallego & Dennis Ott. 2017. Generative grammar and the faculty of language: Insights, questions, and challenges. Ms., to appear in Catalan Journal of Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo & Luigi Rizzi. 2010. The cartography of syntactic structures. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 51–66. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Contreras, Heles. 1976. A theory of word order with special reference to Spanish. Amsterdam: North Holland.Search in Google Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio. 2012. Discourse-related features and functional projections. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759613.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio. 2016. Information and discourse structure. In Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds.), The Oxford guide to the Romance languages, 596–608. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199677108.003.0034Search in Google Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio, Ion Giurgea & Eva-Maria Remberger. 2015. Focus fronting between declaratives and exclamatives. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 60. 257–275.Search in Google Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio & Eva-Maria Remberger. 2017. Focus Fronting. In Andreas Durfter & Elisabeth Stark (eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax, 502–535. Berlin: de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110377088-014Search in Google Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria. 2017. Cleft constructions. In Andreas Dufter & Elisabeth Stark (eds.), Manual of Romance morphosyntax and syntax, 536–568. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110377088-015Search in Google Scholar
DeLancey, Scott. 2001. The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 33. 369–382.10.1016/S0378-2166(01)80001-1Search in Google Scholar
Drummond, Alex 2017. IbexFarm (Version 0.3.9) [Software]. Available at http://spellout.net/ibexfarmSearch in Google Scholar
Dufter, Andreas & Christoph Gabriel. 2016. Information structure, prosody, and word order. In Susann Fischer & Christoph Gabriel (eds.), Manual of grammatical interfaces in Romance, 419–455. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110311860-017Search in Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 1997. The dynamics of focus structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511519949Search in Google Scholar
Feldhausen, Ingo & Maria del Mar Vanrell. 2014. Prosody, focus and word order in Catalan and Spanish. An optimality theoretic approach. In Susanne Fuchs, Martine Grice, Anne Hermes, Leonardo Lancia & Doris Mücke (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th international seminar on speech production (ISSP), 122–125. Köln: Universität zu Köln.Search in Google Scholar
Féry, Caroline & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds.). 2016. The Oxford handbook of information structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Frey, Werner. 2010. Ā-movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German. Lingua 120. 1416–1435.10.1016/j.lingua.2008.09.016Search in Google Scholar
Gabriel, Christoph. 2007. Fokus im Spannungsfeld von Phonologie und Syntax: Eine Studie zum Spanischen. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert.10.31819/9783964561954Search in Google Scholar
Gabriel, Christoph. 2010. On focus, prosody, and word order in Argentinean Spanish: A minimalist OT account. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem 4. 183–222.Search in Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in H. Paul Grice (1989), Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Grosz, Patrick. 2012. On the grammar of optative constructions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.193Search in Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Bravo, Rodrigo. 2008. La identificación de los tópicos y los focos. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 56(2). 363–401.10.24201/nrfh.v56i2.969Search in Google Scholar
Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007. In place – Out of place? Focus in Hausa. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form: Generalizations across languages, 365–403. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.10.1075/la.100.20harSearch in Google Scholar
Heidinger, Steffen. 2014a. El foco informativo y la posición sintáctica de los depictivos orientados al sujeto en español. Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxia 41. 51–74.10.15304/verba.41.1501Search in Google Scholar
Heidinger, Steffen. 2014b. Fronting and contrastively focused secondary predicates in Spanish. In Andreas Dufter & Álvaro S. de Octavio Toledo y Huerta (ed.), Left sentence peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, variationist and comparative perspectives, 125–153. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.214.09heiSearch in Google Scholar
Heidinger, Steffen. 2015. Optionality and preferences in Spanish postverbal constituent order. An OT account without basic constituent order. Lingua 162. 102–127.10.1016/j.lingua.2015.05.003Search in Google Scholar
Hoot, Bradley. 2012a. Presentational Focus in Heritage and Monolingual Spanish. PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago.Search in Google Scholar
Hoot, Bradley. 2012b. Narrow focus on pre-nominal modifiers in Spanish: An optimality-theoretic analysis. In Kimberly Geeslin & Manuel Díaz-Campos (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 14th Hispanic linguistics symposium, 293–307. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.Search in Google Scholar
Hoot, Bradley. 2016. Narrow presentational focus in Mexican Spanish. Probus 28(2). 335–365.10.1515/probus-2014-0004Search in Google Scholar
Hoot, Bradley. 2017. Narrow presentational focus in heritage Spanish and the syntax-discourse interface. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7. 63–95.10.1075/lab.14021.hooSearch in Google Scholar
Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel. 2015a. Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse-syntax interface. Ampersand 2. 49–60.10.1016/j.amper.2015.03.001Search in Google Scholar
Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel. 2015b. When focus goes wild: An empirical study of two syntactic positions for information focus. Linguistics Beyond and Within 1. 119–133.10.31743/lingbaw.5627Search in Google Scholar
Jones, Michael A. 2013. Fronting, focus and illocutionary force in Sardinian. Lingua 134. 75–101.10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.014Search in Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 1991. Modality. In Arnim von Stechow & Dieter Wunderlich (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research, 639 − 650. Berlin: de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110126969.7.639Search in Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 2012. The notional category of modality. In Modals and conditionals. New and revised perspectives, 27–69. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234684.003.0002Search in Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 1995. The semantics and pragmatics of polarity items. Linguistic Analysis 25. 209–257.Search in Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In Caroline Féry,, Gisbert Fanselow & Manfred Krifka (eds.), The notions of information structure, 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag.10.1556/ALing.55.2008.3-4.2Search in Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
López, Luis. 2009. A derivational syntax for information structure. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557400.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura. 2001. Exclamative constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Österreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals. An international handbook, 1038–1050. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110194265-016Search in Google Scholar
Muntendam, Antje G. 2013. On the nature of crosslinguistic transfer: A case study of Andean Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 16. 111–131.10.1017/S1366728912000247Search in Google Scholar
Nunes, Jairo. 2001. Sideward movement. Linguistic Inquiry 31. 303–344.10.1162/00243890152001780Search in Google Scholar
Nunes, Jairo. 2004. Linearization of chains and sideward movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/4241.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2005. The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273829.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2007. Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings. In Gillian Ramchand & Charles Reiss (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, 475–501. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199247455.013.0016Search in Google Scholar
Rett, Jessica. 2011. Exclamatives, degrees and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 34. 411–442.Search in Google Scholar
Rialland, Annie & Stéphane Robert. 2001. The intonational system of Wolof. Linguistics 39. 893–939.10.1515/ling.2001.038Search in Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar. Handbook in generative syntax, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-011-5420-8_7Search in Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 2013. Notes on cartography and further explanation. Probus 25(1). 197–226.10.1515/probus-2013-0010Search in Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1. 75–116.10.1007/BF02342617Search in Google Scholar
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 2015. The interaction of focus, givenness, and prosody. A study of Italian clause structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737926.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Sánchez Alvarado, Covadonga. 2018. The realization of focus in Asturian Spanish. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 17. 1–28.10.5334/jpl.176Search in Google Scholar
Trotzke, Andreas. 2017a. German grammar and mirativity: Experimental evidence. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15. 460–488.10.1075/rcl.15.2.07troSearch in Google Scholar
Trotzke, Andreas. 2017b. The grammar of emphasis: From information structure to the expressive dimension. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9781501505881Search in Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1995. Phonological Phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus, and prominence. PhD Dissertation, MIT.Search in Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 1999. On the relation between syntactic phrases and phonological phrases. Linguistic Inquiry 30. 219–255.10.1162/002438999554048Search in Google Scholar
Uth, Melanie. 2014. Spanish preverbal subjects in contexts of narrow information focus: Non-contrastive focalization or epistemic-evidential marking? Grazer Linguistische Studien 81. 87–104.Search in Google Scholar
Vanrell, Maria del Mar & Olga Fernández-Soriano. 2013. Variation at the interfaces in Ibero-Romance: Catalan and Spanish prosody and word order. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 12. 253–282.10.5565/rev/catjl.63Search in Google Scholar
Watters, David E. 2002. A grammar of Kham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486883Search in Google Scholar
Zanuttini, Raffaella & Paul Portner. 2003. Exclamative clauses: At the syntax-semantics interface. Language 79. 39–81.10.1353/lan.2003.0105Search in Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, María-Luisa. 1998. Prosody, focus and word order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, María-Luisa. 1999. Las funciones informativas: Tema y foco. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 4215–4244. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston