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In:Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 214] 2014
► pp. 101–124

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Chapter 4. Spanish predicative verbless clauses 
and the left periphery

 | The Ohio State University
 | University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
Published online: 31 July 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.214.08gut
Spanish predicative verbless clauses, in which noun phrases display predicative content, are of interest for the study of the left periphery because they systematically involve displacement to this region of the clause. After considering several previous analyses, it is proposed that Spanish predicative noun phrases can be analyzed in terms of predicate inversion in this type of structural configuration. XP predicate movement is triggered by a strong affective feature, which needs to be checked in the course of the syntactic derivation. Other properties of a semantic and pragmatic nature are related to this configuration. For example, only individual-level predicates are allowed, the DP-subject of the construction is semantically strong, and predicate fronting requires this subject to be topical.
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