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18 - Syntax and its Interfaces

from Part III - Spanish Morphosyntax and Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2018

By
Timothy Gupton
Edited by
Kimberly L. Geeslin
Kimberly L. Geeslin
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Summary

In this chapter I review the basics of a selected number of lines of inquiry into syntactic interfaces as viewed from a generative theoretical perspective. I have chosen to examine a series of particular challenges posed by the interface between the narrow syntactic module and different modules of the grammar, such as the lexicon, including subcategorization, theta-roles, lexical and compositional semantics, and the challenge posed by different meanings of the pronoun SE in Spanish. I also briefly review the syntax-morphology interface, in particular predicate-level (i.e., subject-verb) agreement, and noun phrase-internal (NP/DP) agreement processes. With respect to the syntax-pragmatics interface, I survey the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns as well as the interaction of subject position with focus structure, the latter of which has particular relevance for the syntax-information structure interface. Finally, I consider recent studies of the syntax-prosody interface, paying attention to recent proposals seeking to account for left-peripheral syntactic structures involving contrastive and topical constituents. Although research on these different syntactic interfaces is hardly uniform with respect to the precise model of the grammar proposed, they share a common thread of seeking to determine the descriptive and predictive limits of the syntactic module.
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics , pp. 392 - 414
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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