DOI: 10.5507/ff.14.24440606.03

Focus Fronting and Root Phenomena in Spanish and English

Victoria Camacho-Taboada and Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández

Our purpose in this work is to explore the syntax of focus fronting and negative preposing in embedded contexts in English and Spanish. It is standardly assumed that contrastive focus preposing targets the CP area in English. Emonds (1970, 2004) and Haegeman (2012) show that negative preposing and topic/focus fronting are all root transformations in English. Within the intervention-based analysis of Haegeman (2012) this constraint is explained by assuming the existence of an event operator in factive clauses (Aboh 2005), which stops the discourse-oriented constituent from moving to the left periphery. If so, focus preposing is predicted to be incompatible with referential clauses which are complements of factive predicates. This prediction is not borne out in languages such as Spanish. We propose that crosslinguistic differences can be accounted for by analyzing Spanish focus fronting as movement to spec-TP rather than to spec- CP, thus no blocking effect will be caused by the referential operator in spec-CP.

pages: 47-60



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