Remapping variable subject position in Spanish intransitives

The Subject Position in Spanish Nominalized Infinitives

Marcus Berger, University of Michigan 0. While much recent work has focused on various nominal and verbal properties of syntactic nominalizations, relatively little work has investigated how their internal structure is derived. Many authors adopt a ‘mixed projection’ hierarchy in which verbal projections appear interpolated into an otherwise nominal hierarchy. The resulting combination of proje...

Person restrictions in Basque intransitives

Subject position affects EEG magnitudes

EEG (electroencephalography) has been used for decades in thousands of research studies and is today a routine clinical tool despite the small magnitude of measured scalp potentials. It is widely accepted that the currents originating in the brain are strongly influenced by the high resistivity of skull bone, but it is less well known that the thin layer of CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) has perhaps...

Variable development of intersubjectivity in Spanish

As has been shown by Traugott & Dasher (2002), discourse markers proceed along the following grammaticalization cline; non-subjective > subjective > intersubjective uses. We look for evidence of this grammaticalization cline using a previously unexamined discourse marker in Spanish no sé (‘I don’t know’). Inline with Bybee & Sheibman (1999), we show that no sé seems to be stored in lexical repr...

Extending the sociolinguistic variable to the syntactic level: The case of para + lexical subject + infinitive/subjunctive in Venezuelan Spanish

Previous studies have analyzed variable use of the infinitive versus the subjunctive in clauses following the preposition para (‘for, in order to’) in Spanish in terms of discourse, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. However, no study has analyzed this phenomenon according to extralinguistic factors, nor determined which linguistic factors are the most significant predictors of this va...