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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. 125–154

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Chapter 5. Fronting and contrastively focused secondary predicates in Spanish

 | University of Graz
Published online: 31 July 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.214.09hei
This paper is about the syntactic position of contrastively focused secondary predicates in Spanish. In the literature, fronting is presented as a possible means to encode contrastive focus in Spanish. Based on data from a production experiment I will show however that fronting is a dispreferred strategy for the encoding of contrastively focused secondary predicates (and other postverbal constituents such as direct objects and locative adverbials). The main conclusion is that secondary predicates appear in their base position after the verb, even when contrastively focused. In the last part of the paper I will compare the results of my experiment to other empirical studies on the matter and discuss the grammatical constraints that may underlie the speaker’s choice when encoding contrastive focus.
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Heidinger, Steffen
2018. Acceptability and frequency in Spanish focus marking. In Focus realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 201], ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
Uth, Melanie
2018. Focus realization at the prosody-syntax interface. In Focus realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 201], ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Uth, Melanie & Marco García García
2018. Introduction. In Focus realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 201], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2016. Focus-related Operations at the Right Edge in Spanish [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 7], DOI logo

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