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Language Caplletra : Revista Internacional de Filologia. 2007. No. 42
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- Acusatiu preposicional i dislocació amb clític(2007) Escandell Vidal, María VictoriaCatalan is usually described as a language without prepositional accusative, with the only exception of some pronouns. The aim of this paper is to present some data showing that in most spoken varieties prepositional accusatives are indeed licensed in a specific construction, namely when appearing as topics in Clitic-Dislocation. Interestingly enough, the preposition is systematically excluded with rhematic, nontopical, objects. Dialects differ with respect to the conditions governing the use of the preposition with topics: whereas in written Catalan the preposition appears with pronouns only, spoken Central Catalan extends its use to proper names and human definites as well, and Ibizan shows the wider extension of the phenomenon, with prepositional marking for almost all kinds of topics (pronouns, proper names, human and non-human definites, and even inanimate indefinites). This shows that for Catalan the crucial factor for the occurrence of prepositional accusatives is topicality –not definiteness or animacy, as in Spanish.
- Defectivitat morfològica i variació sintàctica(2007) Gallego, Angel J.This paper discusses a case of parametric variation between Catalan and Spanish that concerns the fronting possibilities within the CP domain (the so-called ÇLeft PeripheryÈ). In particular, attention is paid to Catalan’s weak left peripheral activity, which prevents it from generating sentences that involve a Çmild focalizationÈ pattern very common in Spanish (e.g., «Mucha tontería dice el Gobierno» vs. *«Molta ximpleria diuel Govern»), first noted by Torrego (1980) and further explored by Uriagereka (1988). Interestingly, the same behavior is observed in the v*P domain, which accounts for the fact that VSO sentences (generated through movement of the subject to a specifier position, as Ordóñez 2005; this volume contends) are barred in Catalan, but not in Spanish. It is argued that the relevant micro-parameter has to do with Çmorphological defectivityÈ, not in the sense of Chomsky (2000; 2001) (where such notion is related to the absence of abstract _-features), but in a more morpho-phonological one whereby defectivity follows from having a poorer (explicit) manifestation of features: morphological defectivity of a verbal paradigm weakens both verb movement and peripheral fronting.
- La dislocació a la dreta en català i castellà, microvariació en la interfície sintaxi/pragmàtica(2007) Villalba Nicolás, XavierThis 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 right-dislocation is a marginal phenomenon in Spanish, not only from a quantitative (10 occurrences vs. 232 occurrences in the Catalan text), but from a qualitative point of view: right-dislocation in Catalan affects all the categories, grammatical functions, discourse functions, and distances with respect to the antecedent, whereas in Spanish it is restricted to nominals (SD and DEM) and sentences (SC), to subject and object functions, mainly to a the (re)introduction of a topic in the discourse, and to extreme distances (1 and 4). So then, in order to fulfill the tasks covered by right-dislocation in Catalan, Spanish must resort to other mechanisms — the placement of the dislocate in situ, its omission, or left-dislocation—, which suggests that the difference between these languages has to do with the different discourse management of the same collection of syntactic resources.
- Observacions sobre la posició dels subjectes postverbals en català i castellà(2007) Ordóñez, FranciscoThis is a comparative study of the different positions of postverbal subjects in two closely related languages that nevertheless show clear differences in this respect. The comparative study will allow us to reject the idea that postverbal subjects in Romance languages are in a unique in situ position Spec VP as has been proposed recently (Motapayane1995, Ordóñez 1998, Costa 2000, Alexiadou i Anagnostopoulou 2001, Cardinaletti 2001). On the contrary, this study will show clearly that there is a need for two positions for postverbal subjects in order to understand the parametric differences between Catalan and Spanish. The general hypothesis will be that the subjects can access a higher Spec of what I will call SubjP, but not Catalan. This will account for the different distribution of subjects respects to adverbs, quantifiers, and restructuring contexts. This paper clearly shows that a finer and richer functional structure above VP and below the final landing site of subjects is needed to account for the differences between Catalan and Spanish. Therefore, this paper is another contribution to the cartographic studies initiated by Rizzi (1997).
- Evolució de la sintaxi dels contextos de polaritat negativa en castellà i català(2007) Camus Bergareche, BrunoIn this paper we would like to compare the evolution of the syntax of polar contexts in Catalan and Spanish. By doing so, it would be possible to explain the greater syntactic disponibility of Catalan quantifiers and the important constraints for the same class of words in Spanish. After presenting in the first section the main theoretical questions about polarity in natural languages, we will describe in the second section the syntax of corresponding contexts in Middle Ages for both languages. Then, in the third section we will attend to the evolution towards current situation in order to understand the nature of modern differences between Catalan and Spanish on this area of their syntax.
- Microvariació sintàctica: el català i l'espanyol comparats(2007) Hernanz Carbó, María Lluïsa; Rigau i Oliver, Gemma
- Aportació a l'estudi de la conjunció concessiva "jatsia"(2007) Rofes Moliner, XavierConcessive connectors are the focal point of grammaticalization processes, based on several types of lexical sources. In Catalan, «jatsia» (that) is the result of a grammaticalization process based on an aspectual temporary adverb (or phase adverb), which is comparable to the process that produced «encara que». The case of «encara que» has already been studied specifically by Pérez Saldanya & Salvador (1995), while Klesper (1930), Badia (1982) and Cuenca & Massip (2005) have focused on «jatsia» (that). The interest of the study of these processes is increased in the case of «jatsia»(that) by the polymorphism it shows and by the displacement it has experimented in its use, since it has gone from being of general use in the expression of concessivity to be practically out of use. This is especially due to the fact that this displacement is not restrictive to Catalan but common to other Romance languages,and because it can correlate directly with the generalization of encara que and the appearance of the causal ja que (or later «ja...ja...» in its distributive use). And also, because of the incidence that it had in the precepts of the period and in contemporary normative coding.
- La traducció catalana de la "Història de les amors de París e Viana"(2007) Ferrando Francés, AntoniThe text of the three Catalan editions of «Història de les amors de París i Viana», published in Barcelona and Girona in the last decade of the fifteenth century, shows a linguistic orientation towards Castilian and Italian onomastics. It has led to postulate two hypotheses on its textual dependence: a Castilian origin and an Italian origin. A revision of the text as translation and adaptation for the printing allows to ascertain the confluence of two linguistic layers: one, of the first half of the fifteenth century, which explains the persistence of archaic features and the Italian onomastics, and another, contemporary with the edition, which accounts for the Castilian orientation of the text as a modernising option within the sociolinguistic context of the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic (1479- 1516).
- Un tipus especial d'oracions interrogatives: les interrogatives escindides(2007) Contreras, Joan M.; Roca, FrancescThis paper deals with the properties of interrogative sentences with a split constituent (or split interrogatives) in Catalan and Spanish. We compare split interrogatives with Wh-questions, yes/no questions, different kinds of confirmatory questions and clitic left dislocation constructions. Split interrogatives show a very clear-cut syntactic and phonological distinction between those constituents to be interpreted as shared or old information (theme) and the constituent which receives the focus of the sentence. Following recent theoretical work on the left periphery of the sentence, we propose that the Ground Phrase projection (placed below ForceP) is especially relevant in split interrogatives and that this relevance yields a derivation with two syntactic movements to the higher functional projections. Such analysis accounts for the surface constituent order found in split interrogatives, the semantic interpretation of each part of the sentence, and the syntactic structure of Wh-constituents, and it covers also several constraints on locality, syntactic distribution, definiteness, and negation that characterize split interrogatives.
- Les anotacions marginals al "De amore" català(2007) Cantavella, RosannaA new, philological edition of the marginal notes in Andreas Capellanus’ «DeAmore’s» medieval Catalan translation, uniquely preserved in Real Biblioteca de Madrid’s manuscript II-3096 (I), accompanied by transcriptions of the sentence or paragraph which each note refers to. These notes are thematically classified in four groups and described so as to outline their medieval annotator’s main interests.
- El dantisme de Manuel de Montoliu(2007) Ardolino, FrancescoIn the year 1903 Manuel de Montoliu published the first Catalan version, in prose and poetry, of La Vida Nova, which meant an important stage within the history of pre-Raphaelitism and modernism in Catalonia. In this article the first Dantesque influences in the poetic production of the translator will be detected, the stage of preparation and of presentation of the text will be analysed and, finally, the article will study the progression that the exegesis of Dante’s work determines in Montoliu’s thought. This global vision will leave a redimensionated image of the critic which concerns the originality of his positions, and it will be demonstrated that the interpretations on the figure of Beatrice will lead him into focusing his interest in the most doctrinal aspects of the Divine comedy.
