17.383, Review: Syntax/LingTheories:Knauer&BellostavonColbe(2005)

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Subject: 17.383, Review: Syntax/LingTheories:Knauer&BellostavonColbe(2005)

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1)
Date: 01-Feb-2006
From: Kim Schulte < kschulte at ex.ac.uk >
Subject: Variación Sintáctica en Español 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2006 04:04:14
From: Kim Schulte < kschulte at ex.ac.uk >
Subject: Variación Sintáctica en Español 
 

EDITORS: Knauer, Gabriele; Bellosta von Colbe, Valeriano
TITLE: Variación sintáctica en español
SUBTITLE: Un reto para las teorías de la sintaxis
SERIES: Linguistische Arbeiten 494
PUBLISHER: Max Niemeyer
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2094.html 

Kim Schulte, Department of Hispanic Studies, School of Modern 
Languages, University of Exeter, UK

DESCRIPTION

This book is an edited collection consisting of an introductory chapter 
by the editors and contributions by twelve different authors, most of 
which are based on conference papers presented at the 13th meeting 
of the German Association of Hispanists that took place at the 
University of Leipzig in March 2001. The book is written entirely in 
Spanish; the English translation of the title is ''Syntactic variation in 
Spanish: A challenge for syntactic theories.''

The stated aim of the book is to bring together a wide range of papers 
on syntactic variation with different theoretical and methodological 
approaches and backgrounds, in order to narrow the gap between 
theoretical explanation and empirical description. The contributions 
can be subdivided into two distinct groups. The introductory chapter 
and the following three papers investigate theoretical issues such as 
the compatibility of theoretical frameworks with corpus-based studies, 
the notion of grammaticality, and the comparison of different methods 
of analysis of variation present in corpora. The remaining papers 
discuss specific instances of syntactic variation in Spanish, resorting 
to a variety of different explanatory and methodological approaches.

In what follows, I will briefly summarize of each contribution to this 
volume, providing English translations of the titles.

1. Gabriele Knauer and Valeriano Bellosta von Colbe: ''Syntactic 
variation as a theoretical challenge: an introduction"
The editors begin their introductory chapter by contrasting two 
approaches to linguistic analysis, the 'anomalist' and the 'analogist' 
approach. To the 'anomalists', languages is essentially irregular 
despite some identifiable regular patterns; they view the abstract 
system of language as the result of the sum of utterances in a 
linguistic community, which in turn makes the use of corpora an 
important prerequisite for a correct linguistic analysis. The 'analogists', 
on the other hand, view language as essentially regular and are 
concerned with the competence of the individual and how the speaker 
generates language; their preferred methodological approach is 
introspection by individual speakers.

Following this, the concept of linguistic variation is discussed in some 
detail. The authors observe that most theoretical frameworks are 
reluctant to accept the existence of syntactic variation, whilst it is 
generally accepted that variation exists at other levels of linguistic 
description, as shown by the presence of relatively uncontroversial 
concepts such as allophony, allomorphy, synonymy and polysemy. A 
crucial problem is the so-called 'theoretical paradox of variation', 
caused by a clash between fundamentally different analyses of 
absolute and partial synonymy. 

The authors then discuss why theoretical frameworks have been 
reluctant to accept or include syntactic variation in their analyses. An 
exception to this trend is the neurocognitive approach of 'competing 
motivations'  (e.g. DuBois 1985); otherwise, it is almost exclusively the 
field of sociolinguistics that has concerned itself with the phenomenon 
over the past decades, leading to an increasing divide between 
theoretical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

The final section of the introduction provides a brief overview and 
summary of the papers in the volume.

2. Guido Mensching: ''Syntactic variation, corpus linguistics and 
generative grammar: theories, methods and problems''
This paper discusses the role and usefulness of the study of syntactic 
variation in a generative framework. Mensching argues that the 
internal language of the individual (I-language) must be the object of 
(generative) linguistic analysis. Corpora, representing the external 
language of a speech community (E-language), are thus of very 
limited use, as the only insight they provide is the presence of different 
structures in the grammars of different members of a speech 
community. Only if it can be shown that there is variation in the E-
language of individual speakers is variation of interest to the 
generativist syntactician, who then has various options of analysis. 
Such variation might be due to 'actuation phenomena' outside his I-
language, triggered by socio-linguistic factors etc., or to the availability 
and choice of different lexical options. 

As the object of generativist analysis is the I-language, and the 
appropriate and preferred tool to identify grammatical structures is 
introspection, the frequency with which a particular structure occurs is 
of little importance: infrequent structures may be marked, but what 
counts is only whether or not the speaker considers them to be 
grammatical. However, as the tool of introspection is not available for 
past stages of a language, Mensching defends the use of corpora and 
their statistical analysis for diachronic syntactic studies: a decrease in 
the frequency of a structure over time, eventually leading to its 
complete disappearance, indicates that this structure has disappeared 
from the speakers' I-language. 

3. Josse De Kock: ''Corpus, frequency and grammaticality: thirty 
competing constructions in three corpora''
In this paper, the author picks fifteen variable structures that can take 
different syntactic forms but are semantically equivalent. By comparing 
the frequency with which these alternants occur in a corpus of 
informative prose texts, he establishes the degree to which each 
structure is present in the linguistic system, i.e. the 'degree of 
grammaticality' of each alternant. Based on their relative frequency, 
structures can thus be positioned along a scale of grammaticality; the 
author also observes a correspondence pattern between low relative 
frequency of a structure and the degree of speakers' doubts 
regarding its grammaticality.

A statistical analysis of the occurrence of the same variant structures 
in corpora of spoken Madrid Spanish and spoken Buenos Aires 
Spanish reveals that their relative frequencies differ from those in the 
informative prose texts. The author analyzes this as evidence that 
structures do not have a single, fixed 'degree of grammaticality', but 
that it depends on factors such as medium and place. This means that 
speakers' grammaticality judgements will always depend not only on 
the environment in which they have acquired the language, but also 
on the environment in which they are using it.

4. Nicole Delbecque: ''Corpus analysis as a tool for cognitive grammar: 
towards an interpretation of the alternation between SV and VS order.''
This paper deals with different theoretical approaches to a specific 
issue, the factors determining the position of the subject in Spanish. 
To a certain extent, this contribution is an academic autobiography of 
the author, who describes how and why her own approach has 
changed over time. 

Her initial analysis focuses primarily on the corpus-based 
quantification of language-internal factors such as constituent length 
or the thematic role of the argument, with the aim of setting up 
probabilistic rules that link these factors with the choice of subject 
position. This type of primarily formal analysis is, however, not fully 
satisfactory because the statistical findings tend to become an end in 
themselves, with little real explanatory value.

The next stage of development is a move towards a more functionalist 
approach, based on the semantic features of the verb, on its relation 
to the subject, and on ideas developed in text linguistics and 
discourse analysis, such as thematic progression. Though a number 
of patterns can be identified, the author nevertheless considers this 
approach unsatisfactory, as it does not provide a global, uniform 
explanation. She therefore moves on to a probabilistic cognitive 
analysis, in which markedness plays a crucial part. She identifies 
preverbal subjects as tending to be the point of departure for a 'flow of 
energy', whilst postverbal subjects are typically associated with a more 
stative perception of the event.

The paper concludes by emphasizing the advantages of combining 
the findings of quantitative analysis, the identification of frequent 
lexical and syntactic patterns, and the application of cognitive 
parameters, to arrive at a more holistic understanding of syntactic 
variation.  

5. Alicia González de Sarralde: ''On the relation between subject 
position and narrative structures''
This paper also deals with the variability of the subject position in 
Spanish, choosing a cognitive-functional approach. The author's 
corpus, consisting of 29 different speakers' descriptions of the exact 
same sequence of events, allows for an onomasiological and 
semasiological analysis. The onomasiological analysis reveals the 
different strategies by which the same state of affairs, with the same 
subject referent and the same degree of verbal agentivity, can be 
expressed; the semasiological analysis provides insights into what it is 
that is expressed by the choice between preverbal and postverbal 
subject position. The analysis reveals that subject postposition is not 
uniquely associated with a single function, but that four central 
functions can be identified as typically associated with postverbal 
subjects.

6. Valeriano Bellosta von Colbe: ''Syntactic variation in 'Role and 
Reference Grammar': object position in ditransitive clauses.''
This paper investigates the motivations underlying the varying position 
of the direct and indirect object in ditransitive clauses, within a 'Role 
and Reference Grammar' framework. Combining corpus analysis and 
the grammaticality judgement of individuals, the author identifies a 
number of competing semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors that 
are instrumental in determining the constituent order of such clauses. 
In an analysis based on the principles of Optimality Theory, the author 
comes to the conclusion that the competition between these factors is 
resolved in different ways, depending on the context and 
communicative situation at the moment of utterance.  

7. Pedro Martín Butragueño: ''The prosodic construction of the focal 
structure in Spanish''
Applying an autosegmental analysis of intonation to recordings of 
Mexican Spanish speakers, this paper examines the highly complex 
relations between prosodic, informative (pragmatic), and syntactic 
focus. The author identifies a minimum of three different intonational 
patterns that are used to mark the prosodic focus of a sentence, and 
he also distinguishes two different types of informative focus: neutral 
and contrastive. 

Arguing that focus cannot be accounted for in purely syntactic terms, 
and refining a proposed analysis by Zubizarreta (1998, 1999), he 
convincingly shows that there is little syntactic predictability if 
intonation and prosody are left out of the equation. Instead, it is a 
combination of a constituent's syntactic position and its prosodic 
realization that allows the speaker to mark the focus of a sentence. 

8. Amparo Morales: ''Language acquisition in Puerto Rican children: 
on the null subject hypothesis''
This paper deals with the null-subject parameter. Whilst a binary 
distinction between languages that do and don't allow deletion of 
pronominal subjects is usually taken for granted, this paper shows that 
the situation can, in fact, be more complex.

Whilst standard Spanish is a typical case of a null-subject language, 
Caribbean Spanish is far more permissive of variation between subject 
pronoun deletion and retention. Considering that other syntactic 
patterns which are normally characteristic of non-subject-deleting 
languages are also optionally present in Caribbean Spanish, it would 
appear that this variety lies somewhere between the two prototypes. 

Analysing the use of pronominal subjects in the speech of children 
during language acquisition, the author shows that statistically, there 
are some subject pronouns that are more prone to deletion than 
others. On the one hand, anaphorically used pronouns resist deletion 
to a far greater extent than deictically used ones, which may be 
attributed to a later acquisition of the concept of anaphora. 

A clear distinction can be made in terms of grammatical person. The 
1st and 2nd person singular pronouns tend to be retained to a far 
greater extent than other pronouns, which the author interprets as a 
pragmatic manifestation of children's self-centred perception of the 
world, in which the explicit emphasis of the contrast between 
themselves and the other interlocutor is highlighted by frequent 
explicit pronominal reference. This, the author suggests, may be 
supported by the possibility of using subject pronouns as topicalization 
markers in adult Caribbean Spanish. 

9. Ulrich Detges: ''The grammaticalization of prepositional accusatives 
in Ibero-Romance: a pragmatic hypothesis''
This paper investigates the historical motivation for the present-day 
variation between direct objects with and without the 'prepositional' 
marker ''a''. Generally speaking, prepositional marking of objects is 
often pragmatically motivated, increasing the relevance of the 
respective object. In medieval Ibero-Romance, ''a'' functions as a 
focalizing particle for the rheme of a sentence, whilst it can have at 
least three different functions in the theme of a sentence: contrastive 
focus marker, non-contrastive focus marker, or non-focal thematic 
linking element.  

In modern Spanish, the marker 'a' has developed an important 
discourse pragmatic function, being used by speakers as a strategy of 
forcefully taking or retaining their turn in conversation. This usage has 
its origin in the original focalizing function of ''a'' (i.e. contrastive focus 
between the speaker and the other interlocutor(s)), but the focalizing 
function has gradually been bleached away in favour of a purely 
discourse pragmatic use. 

Expanding his analysis regarding strategies of turn-taking, the author 
identifies a link between three superficially unrelated phenomena: left-
dislocation of direct objects, anaphoric reference to such objects by 
means of a 'redundant' clitic, and the use of the 'prepositional' object 
marker itself.

10. Eugeen Roegiest: ''Pronominal variation in Spanish: the dative 
pronoun between syntax and semantics''
This paper investigates the phenomenon of 'leísmo', i.e. a loss of 
opposition between direct and indirect object pronouns when referring 
to human referents, with the originally indirect object pronoun ''le'' also 
being used for direct objects. Based on a quantitative analysis of a 
corpus of modern Spanish authors, it is shown that there is 
considerable variation in the degree to which individual 
authors/speakers retain the opposition for masculine referents, whilst 
the frequency of the dative pronoun for feminine direct objects is 
relatively low but stable among authors.   

It is then examined which syntactic contexts favour the use of ''le'' for 
direct objects. For constructions which can be either bivalent or 
trivalent, there is a strong tendency to retain the indirect object 
pronoun for the constituent that is the indirect object of the trivalent 
construction, but the direct object of the bivalent one. A similar 
phenomenon is identified for factitive infinitival constructions, in which 
the strong semantic cohesion between the two predicates leads to 
their syntactic fusion, effectively making the construction trivalent. 
>From a semantic point of view, the more active or agentive the 
referent is perceived to be, the more likely it is that the dative pronoun 
is chosen. This can be explained by the fact that indirect objects are 
intermediate between prototypical agents and prototypical patients in 
terms of their agentivity.

The second environment examined, bivalent constructions that can 
have either a direct or an indirect object (verbs of perception or 
expression of emotion), can be understood to be influenced by the 
same agentivity parameter, with the direct object pronoun being the 
preferred option when the focus is on the act of perception rather than 
on the perceived action and its agent.

11. Rena Torres Cacoullos: ''Syntactic variation in diachronic 
perspective: the intensifying dative''
This paper examines the non-argumental use of the indirect object 
pronoun for pragmatic purposes in Mexico and New Mexico, e.g. 
the ''le'' in ''ándale'', where the pronoun has no referent, but instead 
functions as an intensifier of the action expressed by the verb. This 
usage can be contrasted with the 'ethical dative', which does make 
reference to a specific (evaluating) individual.

One important factor in the development of this pronominal usage is a 
diachronic process in which ''le''-constructions have increasingly lost 
their transitive value. This is reflected in the gradual decline of 'leísmo' 
in Mexican Spanish between the 16th and the 19th centuries, for 
which a diachronic frequency analysis is provided. The second factor 
is the loss of the pronoun's referentiality, which is reflected in the co-
occurrence of an indirect object and ''le'' (originally itself an indirect 
object pronoun) in the same clause. 

12. Irania Malaver: ''A comparative analysis of adjectival expressions 
of age in the speech of Seville and Caracas''
This paper examines the choice and variation of the copular verb 
linking a (human referent) noun with an adjectival expression of age, 
comparing the patterns found in Caracas and Seville. 

In the Spanish of Caracas, the choice implies a semantico-pragmatic 
distinction, with the copula ''ser'' being used to assign a person to an 
age group, i.e. classifying that person, whilst the copula ''estar'' is 
used for a more subjective characterization or judgment regarding the 
person's behaviour or appearance. However, this opposition is only 
present in the discourse foreground; in the discourse background it is 
neutralized, leading to an indistinct use of either of the two copulas in 
such contexts.

In the Spanish of Seville, on the other hand, adjectival expressions of 
age are almost exclusively linked by ''ser'', both in fore- and 
backgrounded contexts; the foreground distinction, made by means of 
copula choice in Caracas, is achieved by other (e.g. lexical) means in 
the speech of Seville.  

13. Dexy Galué: '''Me acuerdo que...': pronominal verbs and 
the 'queísmo' phenomenon''
This paper examines the variation between the presence and 
absence of the preposition ''de'' before object clauses. The absence of 
the preposition where it is normatively required is referred to 
as 'queísmo'.

The analysis is based on a sociolinguistic corpus of Caracas speech. 
In a probabilistic approach, the author examines the degree to which 
four different variables influence this variation: (1) the syntactic 
structure of the main clause, (2) linguistic material separating main 
verb and subordinate clause, (3) presence/absence of phonological 
sequences similar to ''de'' preceding the subordinate clause, and (4) 
whether the referent of the main clause subject is the speaker, and 
whether he identifies with, or disassociates himself from, the content 
of the subordinate clause. The statistical analysis reveals that only (1) 
and (3), as well as the speakers' socio-economic background, are 
relevant variables. In particular, the nature of the main verb is 
identified to be relevant; reflexive verbs, which normatively require the 
presence of ''de'', are subject to 'queísmo' particularly frequently. This 
is viewed as a possible analogical extension of the non-reflexive 
subordination pattern without 'de', and it is analyzed as a syntactic 
reorganization of the construction: where ''de'' is omitted, the 
conjunction ''que'' is, according to the author, reanalyzed as taking the 
place of the preposition separating the two clauses.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

This volume clearly achieves its main aim of bringing together a wide 
variety of approaches and methodologies used in the analysis of 
syntactic variation. It has a good balance between primarily theoretical 
papers and more specific case studies.

The main insight that can be gleaned from this book is the fact that 
syntactic variation cannot be explained or accounted for if syntax is 
viewed on its own; other variables such as pragmatic and 
sociolinguistic factors, but also formal elements such as prosodic 
structure, have to be factored into the equation to understand the 
mechanisms at work. In particular, the many different variables 
identified as relevant in this volume show how complex and multi-
faceted the interaction between syntax and other levels of linguistic 
analysis is. In this respect, the contribution by Guido Mensching is 
perhaps of particular value, as it shows why formal syntactic 
approaches such as generativism/minimalism are of little value for the 
analysis of syntactic variation: By excluding most factors that can 
determine the choice between syntactic structures from the domain of 
the analysis, such models have little explanatory value. WHY a 
speaker makes a particular choice, and what it is that triggers this 
choice of one syntactic structure over another in a particular 
utterance, is a crucial question that, as shown by this volume, requires 
an analysis that goes beyond the purely syntactic domain.

Many papers in this volume are characterized by the extensive use of 
corpora and probabilistic analyses of which contexts are more likely 
than others to trigger the use of one syntactic variant rather than 
another. One great strength of this methodological approach is that it 
can identify patterns of syntactic variation even where the speaker 
has a genuine choice between competing structures; it can identify 
tendencies even where the choice in any individual utterance is 
unpredictable. In a diachronic perspective, such tendencies or 
statistical preferences are, of course, a likely starting point for a 
subsequent entrenchment of the more likely or 'preferred' structure in 
a particular context. Synchronically, it casts some doubt on the view 
that grammaticality is a binary property, as shown in the contribution 
by Josse De Kock, who argues that a syntactic structure's degree of 
grammaticality can be variable, even for a single speaker.

Though some of the more data-based papers in this volume could 
have done with a more extensive theoretical discussion of their 
findings, and in some cases of existing work dealing with the 
respective phenomenon, the standard of the contributions is generally 
high, and they provide genuinely new insights into the range of factors 
underlying the phenomenon of syntactic variation. 

REFERENCES

DuBois, John, 1985. 'Competing Motivations', in ''Iconicity in Syntax: 
Proceedings of a Symposium on Iconicity in Syntax, Stanford, June 24-
26, 1983'' ed. by J. Haiman, 343-365. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: 
Benjamins.

Zubizarreta, María Luisa, 1998. ''Prosody, Focus and Word Order.'' 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa, 1999. 'Las funciones informativas: tema y 
foco', in ''Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, Vol.3: Entre la 
oración y el discurso. Morfología'', ed. by I. Bosque and V. Demonte, 
4215-4244. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kim Schulte is lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK, where he 
teaches Spanish, Portuguese and Romance linguistics. His research 
interests include pragmatic causation in syntactic change in a 
comparative Romance perspective, the evolution and emergence of 
non-finite structures, and contact-induced language change.





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