Based on the seminal work of Rizzi (1997) and others, this dissertation explores the left periphery of Spanish sentences, with particular attention to interrogative structures and their replies. The central claim of this work is that a sentence used as an answer has a syntactic structure specific to this function. Not every declarative sentence can be used felicitously as a reply to a question. This dissertation provides a syntax-based account of the possible structures allowed as answers to particular questions. I have argued for the differentiation of answers from identificational focus, on the grounds of the non-contrastive character of answers (including fragment answers) and their different positions in the sentence. This differentiation not only allows us to better understand the structure of answers, but also provides a new perspective for the study of the Focus layer and the left periphery as a whole. An additional element introduced in the discussion is the Confirmation Phrase, presented here as an extended projection of the phrase requiring confirmation, which is visible through a wh-morpheme (que in Spanish). This projection allows for some syntax-based fine-tuning of the expression of the meaning of questions, distinguishing information questions from confirmation ones. The proposal put forward in this work is that the Focus layer in the left periphery of the sentence hosts functional projections that host separate features, of which one, [+answer], hosted in Answer Phrase (AnsP), determines the character of answer of a sentence, and another, [+wh], hosted in WhP, triggers wh-movement. These features can additionally combine with a Force feature [+Q] to produce complex interrogative structures. This structure gives a unified account of regular wh-questions and split questions (interrogative structures including a proposed answer that appears as a tag linked to the question by a particular intonation). It also links split questions to the structure of sentences used as answers, by virtue of the presence of an Answer Phrase and a [+answer] feature in both structures. These elements of the analysis, together with the confirmation feature hosted in ConfP, provide tools to start a comparative analysis of the semantics of different types of questions.

The Spanish left periphery: Questions and answers.

Complementizers offer a window into the architecture of the left-periphery and further our understanding of the demarcation of the boundaries between the C(omplementizer) and T(ense) domains. Using the articulated left-periphery as a laboratory and Spanish constructions featuring more than one complementizer as a point of departure, the author delivers new insights into the syntactic positions and behavior of Spanish complementizer que along the left edge. These observations have far-reaching consequences to such fundamental linguistic concepts as the derivation of left dislocations, ellipsis, and locality of movement. Of great interest to syntax graduate students and researchers in general, this volume provides a stepping stone to cracking the code on several current syntactic questions, including the widely-contested position of preverbal subjects in null-subject languages like Spanish. In addition, it offers the linguist a bountiful toolbox for the cross-linguistic investigation of a number of left-peripheral and clausal phenomena.

Since the advent of syntactic cartography, left sentence peripheries have begun to take center stage in linguistic research. Following the lead of Rizzi (1997), much work on left peripheries has been focused on Italian, whereas other Romance languages have attracted somewhat less attention. This volume offers a well-balanced set of articles investigating left sentence peripheries in Spanish. Some articles explore the historical evolution of left dislocation and fronting operations, while others seek to assess the extent – and the limits – of variation found between different geographical varieties and registers of the contemporary language. Moreover, the volume comprises several case studies on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and information structure, and the implications of these for pragmatic interpretation and the organization of discourse. Cross-linguistic and typological perspectives are also provided in due course in order to position the analyses developed for Spanish within a larger research context.

The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was built locally by people who existed at the peripheries of empire. Organized along routes and centralized into local nodes, peripheral knowledge accumulated in regional centers before moving on to the heart of the empire in Spain. The study takes the Kingdom of Guatemala as its departure point and examines the related aspects of documents and distance in three sections: part one looks at document genre, and how the creation of documents was shaped by distance; part two looks at the movement of documents and the workings of the mail system; part three looks at document storage and how archives played an essential part in the flow of paper.

Mapping the Left Periphery, the fifth volume in "The Cartography of Syntactic Structures," is entirely devoted to the functional articulation of the so-called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure. The papers collected here identify, on the basis of substantial empirical evidence, new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features that are typically expressed in the left periphery. The volume also submits the richly articulated CP structure to further crosslinguistic checking. The research presented here has led to the identification of new, important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery. With contributions from African languages, Chinese, Hungarian, Romance languages, and Italian dialects, Mapping the Left Periphery will be of interest to syntacticians working on comparative syntax, and more specifically on Romance grammar.

This book investigates a number of word order phenomena in Spanish, concentrating on this language's unmarked word order and the perturbations of this order that result from topicalization and wh-movement.