Wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance: A locative account

Abstract

This paper explores the hypothesis that wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance is a type of locative inversion, involving a null locative argument. Ibero-Romance displays fine-grained, systematic variation determined by verbal class and variety, offering evidence that Ibero-Romance neutral word order is SVO, rather than VSO as claimed by some null-subject accounts. It is proposed that ‘locative’ subject-verb inversion is a consequence of grammatically-encoded deictic features correlating with the semantic properties of the verbs involved. The locative element, available unequally across Ibero-Romance, can surface in different positions in the left periphery, yielding the variation encountered. The data indicate that the licensing of these constructions depends neither on the null-subject parameter, since this type of inversion also occurs in non- and partial null-subject varieties, nor on the unaccusative/unergative division, though in both cases a degree of correspondence exists.

Contributors

Alice Corr

Journal

Journal ID (issn): 2397-1835

Title: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

Publisher: Ubiquity Press

ISSN (Electronic): 2397-1835

Publication date Created: 29 June 2016

Volume: 1

Issue: 1

Affiliations

University of Cambridge, Magdalene College, Cambridge CB3 0AG, GB

Article

DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.85

Copyright statement: Copyright: © 2016 The Author(s)

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Product

Self URI: http://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.85/

Self URI (journal page): https://www.glossa-journal.org

Categories

Subject: Research