Julio Villa-García

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• The University of Manchester

Hanging Topic Left Dislocations are widely deemed to constitute root phenomena, though they occasionally appear in embedded contexts. I submit that the apparent embeddability of left dislocations is merely illusory: they are in actuality matrix phenomena in disguise. A novel cross-linguistic contrast is brought to light: in English, subordinate han...

This paper investigates the lexicalization of the complementizer that/que in English and Spanish varieties in different contexts along the left edge of the clause. This is performed through discussion of a range of constructions traditionally attributed to the CP domain/left periphery, primarily (but not only) in certain embedded clauses. The ubiqu...

The paper argues for a bisentential, paratactic account of Hanging Topic Left Dislocations wherein the syntactically unconnected hanging topic phrase is the remnant of an elliptical copulative sentence which is linearly juxtaposed to the second, host sentence. This proposal represents a natural extension of Ott’s system for Clitic Left Dislocations...

We provide a variety of empirical arguments in favor of a paratactic account of recomplementation constructions, in which a left-dislocated element appears in between two complementizers. Contrary to integrated analyses assuming Complementizer Phrase (CP) recursion or Rizzi’s split periphery, we assume that the dislocated phrase is structurally ind...

This is the first generative-oriented volume ever published about Asturian and Asturian Galician, two Romance languages which, along with their intrinsic interest, are crucial to understand the parametric distance between Spanish and Galician/Portuguese. Its chapters offer new insights about old puzzles, like pronominal enclisis or apparent violati...

This paper aims to account for a host of old and novel syntactic contrasts between the emphatic polarity particle sí ‘yes’ and its putative counterpart with an instance of the complementizer que – sí que ‘yes that’ in Spanish. Even though the two constructions appear to be synonymous in certain contexts, closer inspection reveals that the two eleme...

This paper investigates dialectal microvariation across the Spanish-speaking world in terms of the presence/absence of que in sí-que contexts. The function of this construction is to signal the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition. In this connection, we argue that the syntactic account recently proposed by Villa-García & González R...

The paper aims to provide a characterization of the colloquial phenomenon of recomplementation (i.e., 'that1/que1' – XP[dislocated] – 'that2/que2' constructions) in both contemporary English and Spanish from a comparative perspective. I draw a systematic comparison between 'that2' and 'que2' and present a host of similarities in terms of the syntac...

The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin August 2018

Cambridge Core - Latin American Studies - The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin

This study assesses the scope of the Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) hypothesis’ predictions with regard to early bilingual acquisition. To this end, we analyze longitudinal corpus data from four bilinguals attesting the acquisition of subjecthood (null versus overt; preverbal versus postverbal) and the pragmatic adequacy of early null and overt su...

This paper investigates TP-ellipsis in Spanish in the context of multiple-complementizer clauses (i.e., … que XP que ellipsis licensor ellipsis site). The paper argues for a standard ΣP-account of TP ellipsis, with the polarity/focal item (e.g., también/tampoco/sí/no) crucially involved in the licensing of ellipsis. It is argued that the XP-que seq...

The paper aims to account for a host of syntactic and semantic contrasts between the emphatic polarity particle sí 'yes' and its putative counterpart with an instance of the complementizer que –sí que 'yes that.' Even though the two constructions appear to be synonymous in certain contexts, closer inspection reveals that the two elements display a...

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 375-388

The paper investigates recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer) constructions in Spanish and provides a number of arguments in favor of analyzing secondary que as the head of TopicP in the left periphery. The paper further examines left-dislocated phrases occurring between overt complementizers and lays out the proposal that sandwiched disloc...