Cover not available

In:Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 75–94

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Matrix complementisers and ‘speech act’ syntax

Formalising insubordination in Catalan and Spanish

 | University of Cambridge
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.06cor
This paper discusses apparent cases of Catalan and Spanish non-embedded clauses headed by the subordinating complementiser que ‘that’, sometimes referred to in the literature as cases of insubordination (Evans 2007, 2009). Three interpretatively distinct types of ‘insubordinate’ que are identified, but only one of these types, viz. quotative que, is shown to be formally identical to the subordinating complementiser. The other two types, viz. exclamative and conjunctive que, exhibit the formal behaviour of speech acts, following Krifka’s (2001, 2003) diagnostics. It is argued that, from a cartographic approach, the three types of ‘insubordinate’ que cannot be accommodated within the split CP, and that, given their formal properties, exclamative and conjunctive que are instead operative within an articulated layer above Force dedicated to encoding ‘speech act’ syntax, a domain argued for in Speas & Tenny (2003), Haegeman & Hill (2014), Haegeman (2014).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Theoretical preliminaries
  • 2.Three types of ‘insubordinate’ que
  • 3.Sentence typing
  • 4.Speech act properties
  • 5.Relative distribution in the Ibero-Romance left periphery
    • 5.1Distribution in the CP
    • 5.2Distribution in the SAP
    • 5.3Mapping ‘insubordinate’ que
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (33)
References
Prieto, Pilar, and Teresa CabréAIEC: Prieto, Pilar, and Teresa Cabré (eds.). 2010. Atles interactiu de l’entonació del català. < [URL]>Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benavente, Jacinto. 1905. AI natural. La casa de Ia dicha. El dragon de fuego. Madrid: F. Fe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beyssade, Claire, and Jean-Marie Marandin. 2006. “From Complex to Simple Speech Acts: a Bidimensional Analysis of Illocutionary Forces”. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, ed. by David Schlangen and Raquel Fernández, 42–49. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional projections: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press.
Núria Alturo, Òscar Bladas, Marta Payà and Lluís PayratóCOR: Núria Alturo, Òscar Bladas, Marta Payà and Lluís Payrató (eds.). 2004. Corpus Oral de Registres. Materials de Treball. Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona. < [URL]>Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corr, Alice. 2016. Ibero-Romance and the Syntax of the Utterance. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Demonte, Violeta, and Olga Fernández Soriano. 2013. “Evidentials dizque and que in Spanish. Grammaticalization, Parameters and the (fine) Structure of Comp”. Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Univerdade do Porto 8: 211–234.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Demonte, Violeta, and Olga Fernández Soriano. 2014. “Evidentiality and Illocutionary Force: Spanish Matrix que at the Syntax-pragmatics Interface”. In Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist, and Typological Perspectives, ed. by Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta, 217–252. Amsterdam: John BenjaminsGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Prada Pérez, Ana. 2009. “What is the Structure of the Left Periphery in Spanish and Catalan?” Ms., Penn State University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. “Insubordination and its Uses”. In Finiteness: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations, ed. by Irina Nikolaeva, 366–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas. 2009. “Insubordination and the Grammaticalisation of Interactive Presuppositions”. Paper presented at the Methodologies in Determining Morphosyntactic Change Conference, Osaka: Museum of Ethnography.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Etxepare, Ricardo. 2008. “On Quotative Constructions in Iberian Spanish”. In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions, ed. by Ritva Laury, 35–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Etxepare, Ricardo. 2010. From hearsay evidentiality to samesaying relations. Lingua 120(3), 604–627.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faller, Martina. 2006. “Evidentiality below and above Speech Acts”. Ms., University of Manchester.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
González i Planas, Francesc. 2014. “On Quotative Recomplementation: Between Pragmatics and Morphosyntax”. Lingua 146: 39–74. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gras, Pedro. 2011. Gramatica de Construcciones en Interacción. Propuesta de un modelo y aplicaci6n al analisis de estructuras independientes con marcas de subordinaci6n en espafiol. PhD dissertation. Universitat de Barcelona.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gras, Pedro. 2016. “Revisiting the Functional Typology of Insubordination”. In Insubordination, ed. by Nicholas Evans and Honoré Watanabe, 113–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane, and Virginia Hill. 2013. “The Syntactization of Discourse”. In Syntax and its Limits, ed. by Raffaella Folli, Christina Sevdali and Robert Truswell, 370–390. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. 2014. “West Flemish Verb-based Discourse Markers and the Articulation of the Speech Act Layer”. Studia Linguistica 68 (1): 116–139. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane, and Shigeru Miyagawa. 2016. “The Syntax of Participants”. Paper presented at GLOW 39, Göttingen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Han, Chung-Hye. 2002. “Interpreting Interrogatives as Rhetorical Questions”. Lingua 112 (3): 201–229. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hill, Virginia. 2014. Vocatives: How syntax meets with pragmatics. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2001. “Quantifying into Question Acts”. Natural Language Semantics 9 (1): 1–40. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2003. “Quantifiers in Questions”. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 3: 499–526.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2014. “Embedding Illocutionary Acts”. In Recursion: Complexity in Cognition, ed. by Thomas Roeper and Margaret Speas, 59–87. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam. 2012. From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martins, Ana Maria. 2013. “The interplay between VSO and Coordination in Two Types of Non-degree Exclamatives”. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 12: 83–109.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munaro, Nicola, and Cecilia Poletto. 2009. “Sentential Particles and Clausal Typing in Venetan dialects”. In Dislocated Elements in Discourse, ed. by Benjamin Shaer, Philippa Cook, Werner Frey and Claudia Maienborn, 173–199. New York/London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery”. In Elements of Grammar: Handbook of Generative Syntax, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Speas, Penny, and Carol Tenny. 2003. “Configurational Properties of Point of View Roles”. In Asymmetry in Grammar, ed. by Anna Maria di Sciullo, 315–345. Amsterdam: John Benjamins doi: Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wiltschko, Martina, and Johannes Heim. 2016. “The Syntax of Confirmationals. A Neo-performative Analysis”. In Outside the Clause. Form and function of Extra-clausal Constituents, ed. by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann, 303–340. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (16)

Cited by 16 other publications

Kandybowicz, Jason, Bertille Baron, Philip T. Duncan & Hironori Katsuda
2023. Ikpana Interrogatives, DOI logo
Rodríguez Ramalle, Teresa María
2023. Evidential Adverbs and Polarity: A Study from Spanish. Languages 8:4 ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. The Grammar of the Utterance, DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Doing things with utterance grammar. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 135 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Vocatives. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 51 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Interjections and particles. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Conclusions. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Introduction. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. The expression of affect. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 157 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. A grammar for the utterance. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Utterances without commitment. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. The grammar of dialogue. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo
Pérez Fernández, Sofía, Pedro Gras & Frank Brisard
2022. Geographical and discursive variation of discourse-connective que in Spanish. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 92 ► pp. 219 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Copyright Page. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. iv ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. General Preface. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. vii ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Abbreviations. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. xi ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue