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In:Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 191–210

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Focus and the syntacticization of discourse

 | Newcastle University
Published online: 8 December 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.10poo
This paper examines two pairs of phenomena: Quantifier Fronting in Old Spanish and Modern Spanish (Mackenzie 2010; Leonetti and Escandell-Vidal 2009) and declarative verb-clitic orders in Old Spanish and ‘Conservative’ Asturian (Fontana 1993; Fernández Rubiera 2009). While the syntax of each construction does not change diachronically, the information-structure interpretation does. The medieval constructions both exhibit wide focus, but the modern counterparts exhibit verum focus. I argue that this change is the result of a ‘syntacticization of discourse’, in which the syntactic mechanism for left-peripheral displacement changes from a formal EPP feature to information-structure specific syntactic features (e.g., [+focus]) as a consequence of changes to the locus of EPP and Tense features (Biberauer and Roberts 2010; Poole 2014).
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Rossi, Silvia & Cecilia Poletto
2022. Bare quantifiers and Verb Second. In Language Change at the Interfaces [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 275], ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo

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