Word Order in Spanish and the Nature of Nominative Case

  • Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
Chapter
Part of the Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory book series (SNLT, volume 45)

Abstract

Much of the research on word order in Romance languages lump Spanish and Italian together and contrast them with French. Spanish and Italian, but not French, are said to allow “free inversion” of the subject. This view is based on the fact that “subject post-posing” in French is only possible in the presence of a triggering element, namely an operator in Comp (a wh-word or its trace) or a subjunctive mood (which might also be analyzed as an operator in Comp). Such a construction, illustrated in (1c-e), is known as stylistic-inversion.1

Keywords

Word Order Direct Object Embed Clause Nominative Case Negative Polarity Item 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1999

Authors and Affiliations

  • Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
    • 1
  1. 1.University of Southern CaliforniaUSA

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