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Introduction
I am associate professor at the UAB, and co-head, with M. Teresa Espinal of the funded research project "The interpretation of functional categories II: expressive meaning and meaning hierarchies" (PID2020-112801GB-100).
My research includes right-dislocation and its interaction with sentence modality and prosody, the semantics and pragmatics of exclamatives, the conceptual and procedimental role of discourse markers, and the phenomenon of expletivity across categories.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 1993 - December 1996
January 2012 - December 2014
Position
- Funded research project "Compositionality of meaning and semantic operations at the syntax-semantics and grammar-cognition interface (COMPOSING)
Description
- compositionality, meaning, semantics, cognition
January 2007 - December 2011
Position
- Microvariation: syntactic features and morphophonological realization (HUM2006-13295-C02-01/FILO)
Description
- syntax, microvariation, Romance Languages
Education
October 1992 - June 2000
October 1986 - July 1992
Publications
Publications (128)
Pragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don't know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this artic...
This chapter provides an overview of the different structures typically included under the category of exclamative sentences. After discussing the theoretical and empirical problems of defining an exclamative sentence-type, we consider the syntax and semantics of prototypical exclamative sentences, in comparison with interrogative and expressive co...
In this paper I will analyze the set of markers that have been associated with exclamative sentence-type and exclamations in Romance, like Catalan ma, mira, que, and si, Italian guarda and che, or Spanish mira, que, si, and vaya. The hypothesis I will defend is that the meaning encoded by each of these markers contribute to create an exclamation sp...
Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to repla...
In this article, we will show that the modal properties of infinitive relative clauses are a direct consequence of their defective functional periphery, namely that they just project a FinP in the case of prepositional relatives, but up to ForceP in wh- relatives. While this truncation analysis helps us explain the special properties of infinitive...
Encara que les obres acadèmiques insisteixen que el valor de la puntuació és principalment organitzatiu i només marginalment una codificació d’aspectes fonètics, en l’àmbit de l’estructura informativa trobem un exemple paradigmàtic de l’ús de la puntuació per codificar l’entonació. No obstant això, a diferència de les marques de la modalitat interr...
This is a study of the defective left periphery of infinitive relative clauses in Romance, and the consequences for modal and aspectual readings, on the one hand, and for current cartographic analyses of focus and topic, on the other.
This is a study of the defective left periphery of prepositional infinitive relative clauses in Romance, and the consequences for modal and aspectual readings, on the one hand, and for current cartographic analyses of focus and topic, on the other.
This is a study of the defective left periphery of infinitive relative clauses in Romance, and the consequences for modal and aspectual readings, on the one hand, and for current cartographic analyses of focus and topic, on the other.
In this chapter, the expressive speech act of so-called ‘ that -exclamatives’ is compared in both Germanic and Romance languages. The chapter first points out important semantic differences between that -exclamatives in the two language groups by mainly focusing on the languages Catalan and German. In order to explain those differences, a detailed...
This chapter summarizes recent work on expressive meaning within a variety of linguistic frameworks and concludes that linguistic research on the formal means of expressing emotions is still understudied across different linguistic complexity levels. Based on this thematic introduction, the chapter provides an overview of the present volume, highli...
In this article we propose analyzing the elements heading prepositional infinitival relatives (libros por/para leer ‘books to read’) as prepositional complementizers generated in the head
of FiniteP. This allows us to make clear differences between prepositional relative sentences and purpose and cause non-relative prepositional constructions, whil...
In this paper, we explore exclamatives when used as responses in a discourse. Our proposal is based on the following pragmatic observation: so-called that-exclamatives in both Germanic and Romance languages are preferred as responses to polar questions, while wh-exclamatives are restricted to a response use in non-polar contexts. We establish this...
Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, whereas the opposite...
In this article, I will reconsider the interaction between the exclamative sentence-type and different quantifier phrases to show that the maximal degree operator of exclamatives may have wide scope over other quantifiers in the sentence, even though, as Heim (2000) has shown us for degree quantification in general, evidence is elusive and subtle....
En este capítulo reviso los problemas teóricos y empíricos que suscitan los fenómenos de interfaz de la estructura informativa con la sintaxis y con la semántica, especialmente en la resolución de ambigüedades. En primer lugar, muestro como la sintaxis infradetermina la representación de la estructura informativa, especialmente en el caso de la pro...
Con contadas excepciones, la tradición gramatical ha desterrado el orden de palabras del ámbito de estudio de la gramática y lo ha confinado al campo de la estilística. No obstante, como nos muestran los avances de la lingüística de las últimas décadas, en las lenguas como el español el orden de palabras es fundamental en la codificación tanto de a...
Romance clitic left-dislocation (CLLD) is widespread across all kinds of non root contexts, however it is forbidden in non finite wh relatives. This article investigates the extent and nature of this restriction, and the consequences it raises for the truncation vs. intervention analysis of the left periphery of embedded sentences. We will show tha...
Catalan and Spanish express the focus-background (FB)
partition of sentence in a very different way (Villalba, 2007,
2011, Leonetti, 2011, Planas-Morales y Villalba, 2015),
particularly in interrogative sentences, where Catalan
allows expresing the background as a right-dislocate,
instead of resorting to deletion (recoverable by means of
the resump...
En aquest article defenso que la distribució restringida dels pronoms forts en les oracions existencials del català és la conseqüència, no pas de l’Efecte de Definitud, com s’ha assumit de manera habitual, sinó de la combinació de les condicions informatives que imposa l’oració existencial, que requereix que el pivot sigui contrastiu, amb la natura...
ABSTRACT: Catalan and Spanish express the focus-background (FB) partition of sentence in a very different way (Leonetti, 2011; Planas-Morales & Villalba, 2015; Villalba, 2007, 2011), particularly in interrogative sentences, where Catalan allows expresing the background as a right-dislocate, instead of resorting to deletion (recoverable by means of...
In this article, we examine the scope interactions of the extreme degree operator underlying exclamatives. While it has been argued that degree operators do not scope (Kennedy 1997), I follow the original insight by Gutiérrez-Rexach (2001) that the degree operator of exclamative sentences must take wide scope over other quantifiers. Even though the...
Analitzar dos casos de pronoms forts amb un comportament inesperat i reconsiderar el paper de l'estructura informativa en la seva distribució:
1) els pronoms forts no poden ser pivots de les oracions existencials:
*Hi havia ella, a la reunió.
`*There was her at the meeting.'
2) els pronoms forts de primera i segona persona apareixen com a dislo...
The exact anaphoric relation between the referent of dislocates and their previous discourse referents has been a matter of much discussion. In this paper, we reexamine this relation under the light of Clark’s notion of bridging (Clark 1977), and connect different anaphoric bridging types with left (LD) and right dislocations (RD) in Catalan. We re...
RD is the default mechanism in Catalan for marking background material. Spanish resorts to either omission or in situ realization of background material. Since in situ realization of background material might raise an ambiguity with focus material, Spanish marks the former prosodically.
THE DATA. Wh-exclamative sentences in Romance pose a challenge to standard accounts of wh-movement and inversion [1]–[3], for they do not pattern consistently regarding subject-verb inversion, nor the presence of a complementizer: (1) a. Bonjour Henri! Comme tu as grandi! good.day Henri how you have grown ‘Good morning, Henri! How much you have gro...
Introduction Infinitival wh-relatives (IR) are widely attested across the Romance landscape: (1) a. Sto cercando una persona con cui discutere questa proposta. (It.) b. Busca un amigo en quien/en el que confiar. (Sp.) Our interest in this presentation will be the inavailability of CLLD (G-Topics for [4]) in these constructions (2) and the consequen...
El català i el castellà expressen la partició focus-referefons (FR) de manera molt diferent (Leonetti 2011, Villalba 2007, 2011, Planas/Villalba 2013), especialment en les oracions interrogatives, en què el català permet la dislocació a la dreta (DD) del rerefons, en comptes de l’omissió (recuperable pel clític o la concordança): (1) a. ¿L’has vist...
Driving expectations on dislocation types from bridging anaphora Lisa Brunetti, Laia Mayol, Xavier Villalba U. Paris Diderot/CNRS, U. Pompeu Fabra, U. Autònoma de Barcelona The present work studies the effect of bridging [1] between a referent and its antecedent on the expectations concerning the position of the corresponding referring expression i...
En esta ponencia reviso los problemas teóricos y empíricos que suscitan los fenómenos de interfaz de la estructura informativa con la sintaxis y con la forma lógica, especialmente en la resolución de ambigüedades de alcance, ligamiento de pronombres y la restricción de los cuantificadores. En primer lugar, muestro como la sintaxis infradetermina la...
The problem Marantz (1996) and McGinnis’s (2002) claim that the aspectual meaning of idioms is structural, systematic and compositional: 1. non-idiomatic a. Hermione hung a picture in five minutes. TELIC b. Harry hung pictures/laundry for/#in an hour. ATELIC 2. idiomatic a. Hermione hung a left in five minutes. [= ‘to turn left’] TELIC b. Harry hun...
In this chapter I have offered empirical evidence concerning the nature of the levels of meaning involved in Spanish degree exclamatives. Particularly, by means of two denial experiments I have tested what speakers perceive as the at-issue meaning of an exclamative. #e interpretation experiment showed that they more easily cancel the ascription of...
We provide a summary of the main syntactic features of exclamative, imperative, and optative sentential modality across Romance. It is shown that in order to isolate a coherent set of defining grammatical properties for each category, it is important to distinguish between form and function. Exclamatives involve a high range of syntactic variation,...
This study analyzes the role of L1 induced transfer in increasing the proficiency of Chinese students when learning the prosodic patterns associated with sentence-type in Romance. We have conducted an experiment involving identifica-tion of declarative and interrogative sentences in Catalan utterances with a postfocal constituent (right-dislocaton,...
Acknowledgments We are thankful to Doriane Gras for help running the experiments. Lisa Brunetti and Xavier Villalba also thank the financial support of the MINECO research project FFI2014-52015 awarded to the UAB.
En aquest article presentem la interacció sintàctica i entonativa de les interrogatives amb dislocació a la dreta (DD) del català, que forma part d’un estudi contrastiu entre el català i l’espanyol de Planas-Morales i Villalba (2013) sobre aquest mecanisme, que s’utilitza en espanyol (Sedano, 2006:60), malgrat que les descripcions gramaticals no el...
Resum : En aquest article estudiem l’evolucio de les oracions exclamatives- qu de grau des del catala antic al catala modern i contemporani. Tracem dos grans canvis que han fet passar aquestes construccions d’un patro general en les llengues romaniques antigues, sense inversio obligatoria ni conjuncio al s. xvi, a un patro menys comu, amb inversio...
This study analyzes the role of L1 induced transfer in increasing the proficiency of Chinese students when learning the prosodic patterns associated with sentence-type in Romance. We have conducted an experiment involving identification of declarative and interrogative sentences in Catalan utterances with a postfocal constituent (right-dis-locaton,...
Presentation at the 2016 Meeting of the SIGGRAM network
In its original formulation [1], bridging is described as a strategy for accommodating the given-new structure in cases where the given content is given for the speaker, but it is not for the hearer (i.e. it is discourse-old and hearer-new in the terminology of [2]). A standard case is the following: (1) In the group there was one person missing. I...
Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach is certainly the most important Spanish semanticist. Unfortunately, most of his recent work has circulated in unpublished form, so we must congratulate him on collecting most of this cutting-edge research on Spanish quantification here. The volume inaugurates the series ‘Theoretical developments in Hispanic linguistics’.
The...
Resum: En aquest article estudiem l'evolució de les oracions exclamatives-qu de grau des del català antic al català modern i contemporani. Tracem dos grans canvis que han fet passar aquestes construccions d'un patró general en les llengües romàniques antigues, sense inversió obligatòria ni conjunció al s. XVI, a un patró menys comú, amb inversió ob...
This paper focuses on a correlation that has been postulated in linguistic theory between the presence of articles and telicity, as applied to idiomatic expressions. We defend the hypothesis that inherent definite feminine clitics that encode abstract semantic objects (indeterminate objects, properties, propositions, facts, atemporal situations) pl...
McGinnis (2002) makes the claim that, in spite of the so-called non-compositionality of phrasal idioms (cf. idiomatic phrases, Nunberg et al. 1994), the very same pattern extends to idiomatic VPs that contain either a singular DP (hung a left ) vs. a bare plural or a mass noun (hung fire). She concludes that the aspectual meaning of idioms is struc...
El estudio teórico de las oraciones exclamativas es relativamente reciente, no en vano los primeros trabajos teóricos exhaustivos sobre estas construcciones datan de los años setenta, entre los que destacan con luz propia Elliott (1974) y Grimshaw (1979). En español, el primer estudio detallado es Bosque (1984), que quedó, junto a Torrego (1988), c...
Cancelling and projecting in exclamatives: levels of meaning under experimental study
Background
Since the initial studies in the seventies by [1] the exact categorization of the meanings conveyed by exclamatives has been a matter of debate, particularly concerning two main aspects: factivity and high degree. Hence, an exclamative sentence like (1...
In this paper we focus on the topic of ambiguity resolution in and be-yond grammar. We deal with two questions: where is ambiguity resolved (in par-ticular, the ambiguity of expressions conveying specific forms of information packaging and common ground management), and what is the design of gram-mar that emerges from the study of ambiguity problem...
La microinformática, entendida como la comparación detallada de los recursos gramaticales que emplean lenguas próximas para codificar la estructura informativa, ofrece posibilidades teóricas y aplicadas de enorme interés. En este artículo planteamos las bases teóricas y metodológicas de la microinformática, que podemos resumir como sigue.
• La arti...
In this paper the behavior of deadjectival nominalizations in Spanish is studied regarding the presence of an eventuality reading. It is shown that whereas abstract nominalizations (la belleza del libro ‘the beauty of the book’) clearly encode an eventuality according to standard tests, neuter nominalizations (lo bello del libro ‘the beautiful part...
It has been reported in the literature that interrogative sentences behave quite differently regarding subject-verb inversion in Spanish and Catalan: whereas the former allows ‘classical’ VS inversion, and particularly VSO, the latter systematically resorts to right-dislocation in all cases (V(O)#S). In this paper we scrutinize this observation fro...
The role of codas in existential sentences has been a matter of debate since the early 70's, but under this label a quite heterogeneous set of material has been included, leading to much misplaced discussion. A case which is so far unresolved is that of eventive existential sentences: Yesterday, there was a live pig roasted. This existential constr...
While our understanding has grown of the discourse role of right-dislocation (RD), there exists a class of RD (continuing RD) that have proven impervious to any principled analysis, for the role of the dislocate is (apparently) null, given that its referent appears immediately before the RD and, thus, simple pronominalisation should suffice to retr...
The HISPACAT database of syntactic constructions in Catalan and Spanish is a dynamic comparative grammar of two closely related languages, which, from a theoretical point of view, offers us a alternative viewpoint to advance in our understanding of the ``atoms'' of linguistic microvariation, and to offer a snapshot of microparametric (in)variance,...
Since the comparative work by Vallduvi (1992, 1994), we know that similar information packagings may resort to completely different formal mechanisms across languages. For instance, right-dislocation (RD) is a highly productive backgrounding strategy in Catalan, but a marginal one in English, resorting in stress shift. To our current understanding,...
Abstract
This article brings new evidence to the fore supporting the hypothesis that the architecture of the DP domain mirrors that of the sentence, particularly concerning the topic–focus articulation. To fulfill this task a Spanish nominal construction (the lo-de construction) is analyzed on a pair with comparative qualitative binominal noun phra...
This volume is a collection of papers presented at the IV NEREUS (http://www.ilg.uni-stuttgart.de/Nereus/) international workshop on the topic Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages, held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on October 9th and 10th, 2008. The main theme of the workshop was the relation between the semantic notion de...
The goal of this article is to show that, unlike recent analyses of the qualitative binominal NP construction (QBNP) that idiot of a doctor/el idiota del médico, Spanish QBNPs require an analysis with the following features: (i) the definite article preceding the subject nominal is a fully-fledged determiner, (ii) the predicate-subject final word o...
In this paper a snapshot is offered of the state of the art in the research on exclamatives, reviewing our current understanding of �classic�� issues, like factivity, high degree, or the relationship between exclamatives and interrogatives, and highlighting new theoretical and empirical challenges, such as the contribution of exclamative sentences...
Since the pioneering work by Enric Vallduví (Vallduví 1992, 1994), we know that similar information packagings may resort to completely different formal mechanisms across languages. For instance, right-dislocation (RD) is a highly productive backgrounding strategy in Catalan, but a marginal one in English, which resorts to stress shift. To our curr...
This article investigates the use of right-dislocation in Catalan and Spanish. We have measured the productivity of right-dislocation in a corpus of an original Catalan text and its Spanish translation regarding four variables: category, grammatical function, discourse function, and distance with respect to the antecedent. The analysis shows that r...
This volume brings together a selection of papers from the eighteenth ‘Going Romance’ symposium, held at Leiden University, 9–11 December 2004. These papers cover a broad range of topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, and acquisition, in a variety of Romance languages.
In this paper it is argued that the highly restricted distribution of standard negation within exclamative sentences receives a principled explanation from the interaction of the basic semantic properties of the exclamative sentence-type --factivity and extreme degree quantification-- with those of the negative operator. Particularly, the negative...
The main hypothesis of this paper is that certain exclamative constructions in Catalan (que-exclamatives) involve a null degree operator. It is shown that, when this analysis combines with Kayne's (Kayne, R., 2002. On some prepositions that look DP-internal: English of and French de. Ms, New York University) insights concerning English preposition...
