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¡Mira! The grammar-attention interface in the Spanish left periphery

  • Laura González López and Andreas Trotzke EMAIL logo
From the journal The Linguistic Review

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on Spanish hearer-oriented particles like the highly frequent verb-based particle mira (lit. ‘look’). We provide a detailed syntactic account of these particles by demonstrating (i) that they must be distinguished from both vocative/appellative and expressive/exclamative particles, and (ii) that they feature illocutionary restrictions familiar from the class of discourse particles in languages other than Spanish. Since our proposal locates mira in the information-structural layer of the clause and, at the same time, demonstrates its sensitivity to the illocutionary component of sentence interpretation, we thus raise more general questions about the interaction between the syntax of speech acts and the syntactic encoding of information structure.


Corresponding author: Andreas Trotzke, Fachbereich Linguistik, Universität Konstanz, Universitätsstraße 10, 78457Konstanz, Germany, E-mail

Acknowledgements

We thank the audience at LAGB 2019 (UCL London) and our anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. Andreas Trotzke gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Generalitat de Catalunya/Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge (grant no. 2017-BP00031). Laura González López thanks Cristina Sánchez López for her help and support through the years.

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Published Online: 2021-02-15
Published in Print: 2021-02-23

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