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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. 253–282

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Chapter 9. On the grammaticalization of the Assertion Structure

A view from Spanish

 | University of Southern California
Published online: 31 July 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.214.14zub
This paper argues that the standard and colloquial variety of Spanish pseudo-clefts provide support for the bi-clausal analysis of such constructions (Ross 1972, Schlenker 1998, 2003, den Dikken et al. 2000), and this transparently encodes the Assertion Structure of the sentence: the pre-copular clause encodes the presupposition and the post-copular clause the assertion, with the focused phrase contained within the latter. It is furthermore argued that the Caribbean Spanish bare-copular construction, in particular the Andean variety of the Bucaramanga dialect of Colombia (Méndez-Vallejo 2009), constitutes a more advanced stage of the bi-clausal grammaticalization of the Assertion Structure, with a reduced bi-clausal structure. Finally, it is suggested that standard Spanish monoclausal sentences with a sentence final focus in a non-canonical word order can be given an analysis that involves a variant of the reduced bi-clausal structure proposed for the Caribbean Spanish bare-copular construction.
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Heidinger, Steffen
2022. Corpus Data and the Position of Information Focus in Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15:1 ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
Vercauteren, Aleksandra
2018. European Portuguese focalizing SER ‘to be’. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 13], ► pp. 297 ff. DOI logo

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