25.725, Review: Syntax; Portuguese; Spanish: Vanderschueren (2013)

[linguist at linguistlist.org]

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-725. Tue Feb 11 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.725, Review: Syntax; Portuguese; Spanish: Vanderschueren (2013)

Moderator: Damir Cavar, Eastern Michigan U <damir at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: 
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
       <reviews at linguistlist.org>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Do you want to donate to LINGUIST without spending an extra penny? Bookmark
the Amazon link for your country below; then use it whenever you buy from
Amazon!

USA: http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-20
Britain: http://www.amazon.co.uk/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-21
Germany: http://www.amazon.de/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistd-21
Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-22
Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistc-20
France: http://www.amazon.fr/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistf-21

For more information on the LINGUIST Amazon store please visit our
FAQ at http://linguistlist.org/amazon-faq.cfm.

Editor for this issue: Rajiv Rao <rajiv at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  


Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 18:07:26
From: Timothy Gupton [gupton1 at uga.edu]
Subject: Infinitivo y sujeto en portugués y español [Infinitive and Subject in Portuguese and Spanish]

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=25-725.html&submissionid=25028470&topicid=9&msgnumber=1
 
Discuss this message: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=25028470


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-2848.html

AUTHOR: Clara  Vanderschueren
TITLE: Infinitivo y sujeto en portugués y español [Infinitive and Subject in Portuguese and Spanish]
SUBTITLE: Un estudio empírico de los infinitivos adverbiales con sujeto explícito
SERIES TITLE: De Gruyter Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 377
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Timothy Gupton, University of Georgia

SUMMARY

Introduction

The introductory chapter presents the two main phenomena in Spanish and
Portuguese under consideration in this monograph: 1) inflected infinitives
(InfFl), which only exist in Portuguese, and 2) infinitives with overt
subjects (IcS), which exist in both Spanish and Portuguese. These infinitive
constructions normally appear in adverbial contexts introduced by a
prepositional connector -- the focus of Vanderscheuren’s book -- in
particular, adverbials preceded by ‘antes de’ (before), ‘ao/al’ (upon),
‘depois/después de’ (after), ‘para’ ((in order) to), ‘por’ (for), and
‘sem/sin’ (without). One of the stated goals of the study is to characterize
the factors determining the variation between inflected and uninflected
infinitives in Portuguese. The second is to shed light on what factors
influence the status of infinitives with lexically overt subjects in Spanish
and Portuguese via an extensive empirical analysis. The comparative nature of
the study seeks to discover subtle differences in the use(s) of these
ostensibly identical structures, and to find out what these reveal about the
fundamental differences between the grammars vis à vis the status of the
infinitive. While the study guiding this monograph takes a general
cognitive-functional approach, the author seeks to arrive at conclusions that
are amenable to a variety of theoretical approaches. The author also explains
the basics of other guiding principles such as economy, iconicity, and
prototipicity, stating that these inform the gradations between grammatical
categories in each respective language relevant for this study of the
syntax-semantics interface. The study utilizes written registers (journalistic
and novels) of Peninsular Spanish and Portuguese corpora, thus avoiding
varieties in which infinitive constructions are either less frequent (e.g.
Brazilian Portuguese) or more frequent (e.g. Caribbean Spanish) than in their
respective Peninsular norms. Corpus analyses of inflected infinitives in
Portuguese were supplemented by results from a self-paced reading task.

Chapter One: “The infinitive”

The first chapter examines the much-debated syntactic and functional status of
infinitives in Spanish and Portuguese. In the first section, the author
presents the justification underlying the perception that infinitives are
defective forms. Putting aside Portuguese inflected infinitives, it is shown
that although infinitives often have a semantically-specified subject, they
are not anchored to tense or to particular discourse participants, both of
which are reflected in morphological agreement deficiencies in infinitive
forms. In both cases, these deficiencies are dependent on other clausal
elements that provide a personal (subject, direct object, or indirect object)
or temporal/modal reference point. In the second section, the author examines
the reasoning behind why infinitives have been analyzed as “verbal nouns” in
the literature -- somewhere between the verb and noun poles. She effectively
demonstrates the classificatory limitations inherent in a definition according
to functional as well as semantic-conceptual criteria, in the end concluding
that infinitives are less prototypical verbs that may behave more or less as
verbs and more or less as nouns. She proposes a four-point continuum to
capture these characteristics, but insists, however, that there are no neat
boundaries between these points and that there are many more possibilities
along the continuum than the four-point spectrum would suggest.

Chapter Two: “The subject”

As the notion of ‘subject’ is central to the monograph, the second chapter
examines the theoretical difficulties related to descriptions of subjects in
the literature. The author starts with defining the term ‘subject’, which is
far from the discrete, universal notion often described within the traditional
European perspective. She cites a number of language typologists who have
shown that subjects are only found in a portion of the world’s languages.
There is cross-linguistic variation with respect to the degree to which the
subject morphologically agrees with the verb, as well as the degree to which
the syntactic position of the subject is fixed. She correctly illustrates that
the notion of subject is not only problematic cross-linguistically, but also
within languages, citing the well-known cases of (a certain sub-class of)
psychological verbs in languages like Spanish (e.g. ‘gustar’, ‘interesar’,
‘sorprender’), which select an indirect object experimenter. These verbs
differ from language to language, even in the case of cognate verb forms which
share a common root, as in the case of Spanish ‘gustar’ and Portuguese
‘gostar’. She also notes other problematic constructions such as existential
constructions (formed with ‘há/hay’), which often exhibit defective verb
paradigms and passive constructions, in which the verb morphologically agrees
with the theme or patient, and not the agent -- a construction which often
appears to convert an object into a grammatical subject. Given these
difficulties of classification, the author suggests that the category of
‘subject’ is a prototype with certain morphosyntactic, pragmatic, semantic,
and cognitive properties. More or less prototypical exemplars of the category
exist, and multiple continua of protypicality exist between the category of
subject and other grammatical categories such as direct and indirect objects.

Chapter Three: “Adverbial subordinates”

This chapter bears great similarity with the previous two, as the author
argues that not only is the concept of ‘subordinate clause’ problematic, but
that ‘adverbial subordinate’ is as well. This is due to the heterogeneous
nature of these constructions, which exhibit a greater or lesser degree of
linkedness to the main clause. Additionally, she argues that the degree of
syntactic autonomy reflects the degree of semantic-conceptual autonomy. In
this chapter, the author examines each of the six adverbial connectors under
investigation that precede infinitives in Spanish and Portuguese: ‘antes de’
(before), ‘ao/al’ (upon), ‘depois/después de’ (after), ‘para’ ((in order) to),
‘por’ (for), and ‘sem/sin’ (without). In turn, she shows that each of these
displays different combinatory behaviors (e.g. with infinitives and/or finite
verbs, selection of subjunctive or indicative), and that each exhibits uses
that are more or less “integrated” into the main clause. In the end, the
general tendency is that when infinitives are used, there is a stronger link
to the main clause.

Chapter Four: “Plan: the adverbial infinitive with overt subject in Spanish
and Portuguese”

Chapter Four is a brief pause in which the author lays out the goals of the
subsequent chapters and formally states many of the research questions guiding
the study in this monograph. Among these are the following: 1) Do Portuguese
inflected infinitives behave comparatively more like prototypical finite verbs
than infinitives with subjects?, 2) Do Spanish infinitives behave more like
nouns?, 3) Do subjects of infinitives possess the semantic features typical of
subjects of finite verbs?, 4) Given that Spanish subjects of infinitives
appear to behave (formally) less typically, what type(s) of subjects accompany
them and what are the indicators of less typical subjects?, 5) Given the
diversity present in adverbial subordinate clauses, what differences are
present among these structures?, 6) Does this diversity influence the
selection of inflected or uninflected infinitives in Portuguese in cases of
coreference between the subject of main and subordinate clauses?, 7) Do the
two languages behave differently with respect to the use of subjects of
(uninflected) infinitives with the six different adverbial connectors?, and 8)
Are there differences present when the same (cognate) connector is used?

Chapter Five: “The Portuguese inflected infinitive: new perspectives for an
old problem”

Chapter Five reformulates the puzzle regarding the apparent optionality
between inflected and uninflected Portuguese infinitives, restating the fact
that previous analyses, which have used a variety of terms to capture this as
phenomenon, such as ‘the personal infinitive’, or as ‘the conjugated
infinitive’, have shed little light on this issue. The author reviews the
contexts in which inflected infinitives have been claimed to be obligatory as
well as those in which it appears to display free variation. She then
introduces the variables suspected of conditioning the use of InfFl forms,
which are first analyzed via monofactorial statistical methods. The three
principal underlying factors are autonomy of the verb form from the main
clause, the degree of ‘verbiness’, and the interpretive accessibility of the
subject of the subordinate clause subject. The statistical results suggest
that pronominal verbs, periphrastic constructions and the presence of negation
all favor the use of an InfFl. Following the monofactorial analysis, the
author combines all of the categorical variables into a multifactorial
statistical analysis via logistic regression in order to determine which
variables have comparatively greater impact in favoring the choice of an
InfFl. The relative impact of these factors, from greatest to least, is as
follows: pronominal verb > periphrastic construction > governing head >
connector type > dynamicity > negation > lexical aspect >
preposed/parenthetical position > pause (among those postposed). The first
conclusion is that whenever one considers contexts in which both inflected and
uninflected forms compete, inflected forms are not as frequent as it is often
claimed. Also, more autonomous clauses bear greater similarity to prototypical
independent clauses. Additionally, more overt verbal markings found in InfFl
forms (e.g. periphrasis, pronominal forms, and negation) and markings of
decreased semantic ‘verbiness’ with less dynamic verbs signal that the
subordinate clause verb is the autonomous center of its clause. It is also
found that decreased accessibility of the subject of the main clause entails
greater autonomy for the infinitive clause, and this indirectly implies a
status nearer to that of an independent clause.

The subsequent section of the chapter centers on the experimental
psycholinguistic task designed to test the cognitive predictions of Vesterinen
(2006, 2011). To inform questions of cognitive processing, Venderschueren
conducted a computer-based Self-paced Reading Task (SRT) with 61 native
Portuguese-speaking participants, ages 17 to 73, who were affiliated with the
University of Lisbon using Tscope C Library to measure reading times to
provide a window on cognitive effort required for comprehension of the
stimuli. The statistical results suggest that inflected forms can contribute
to a faster and easier interpretation of a subject of an infinitive that runs
the risk of decreasing in accessibility due to length of the sentence in
question; however, the author notes that this also depends on other factors
that influence subject accessibility. Only one accessibility-reducing factor
displayed positive effects when coupled with an inflected infinitive:
distance. Therefore, it appears that the greater the distance of the
infinitive from the main clause verb, the more advantageous the effect of the
inflected infinitive. Inflected infinitives, then, provide a cognitive
advantage related to accessibility such that InfFl forms facilitate processing
in longer, more complex sentences in which the subject of the infinitive
becomes less easily interpreted.

Chapter Six: “The infinitive with a lexical subject: a comparative study”

Chapter Six compares structures involving an infinitive accompanied by an
overt subject in both Spanish and Portuguese. The first section of the chapter
is a comprehensive literature review of these structures in Portuguese and
Spanish from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Despite the apparently
little consensus, there are common threads among researchers. The first is
that the structure is comparatively more widespread in Portuguese. The second
is that adverbial infinitives accompanied by an IcS, which are found in both
Spanish and Portuguese, imply a certain level of syntactic-semantic autonomy.

The empirical corpus study in the remainder of the chapter is comparative,
seeking to determine if verbs in IcS constructions in Portuguese behave more
like prototypical verbs than their Spanish counterparts. The prediction is
that Portuguese IcS constructions will be more clause-like -- not only the
verbs in question, but also the subjects of these infinitives. Therefore, they
will be more like finite clauses and appear in a greater variety of
constructions than in Spanish. It is also predicted that Portuguese IcSs will
be less likely to exhibit nominal status than Spanish. The analysis in this
chapter is exclusively monofactorial, and does not include a multifactorial
analysis via logistical regression, since, in the author’s view, a model
predicting whether a certain IcS constructions will be Spanish or Portuguese
has little theoretical value.

The data show that a number of factors come to bear on IcS constructions in
both languages -- and in a rather complex fashion. These are the clausality of
the construction, four key ‘subfactors’ (i.e. ‘verbiness’, subjectivity,
complexity, and autonomy), and (semantic) adverbial influence. According to
predictions, Portuguese IcS constructions display greater variability and
allow for more possibilities than Spanish IcS constructions. However, the
semantics of the prepositional connector is crucial in this choice. In IcSs
with temporal adverbials (e.g. ‘antes de’, ‘depois/después de’, and ‘ao/al’),
Portuguese subjects and verbs display more characteristic behaviors of
subjects and verbs, respectively, display greater internal complexity, and
exhibit a more complete clausal structure than their Spanish analogues. The
same is found for IcSs with adverbial constructions formed with ‘por’ and
‘sem/sin’; however, since most of these constructions are formed with state
predicates, whose subjects tend to be emphatic in both languages, fewer
differences were attested than predicted. The appearance of Spanish IcS
subjects in postverbal position is claimed to be a reflex of reduced clausal
structure in IcS constructions. IcS constructions with ‘al’ are found to be
much more frequent and productive in Spanish than with ‘ao’ in Portuguese,
which tends to avoid the construction altogether. This is claimed to be
related to the greater ‘nouniness’ of the Spanish IcS construction and the
greater ‘verbiness’ of the Portuguese construction. The relative ‘nouniness’
of the Spanish construction is claimed to account for the fact that subjects
of IcS constructions appear in postverbal position, similar to the default
position for nominal modifiers (e.g. adjectives) in Spanish. Therefore, the
unmarked subject position for IcS constructions in Spanish is postverbal
despite the fact that it is the marked position with finite predicates in
general. As Portuguese constructions (those with ‘ao’ aside) tend to be
comparatively more verbal in nature, subjects of Portuguese IcS constructions
tend to appear in preverbal position.

EVALUATION

This monograph is refreshingly complete and thorough, and achieves its stated
goals. The author has succeeded in creating a work that is amenable to a
variety of theoretical approaches. One of its strongest points -- its
remarkably broad and deep literature review -- is unfortunately one of its
chief disadvantages with respect to readability, as it occasionally gets mired
in explaining the underpinnings of theoretical concerns whose import is not
always readily ascertainable. As this reviewer’s training is primarily
generative in orientation, I can accept some of the blame for this. In the
end, however, there is no question that this monograph significantly advances
our knowledge of the syntax-semantics interface with respect to infinitive
constructions in Spanish and Portuguese.

The Portuguese analysis is particularly well justified, since the findings of
the corpus analysis are tested by experimental methods based on the corpus. It
is refreshing that an experimental monograph should include not only its
methodology in its entirety in the 32-page appendices (something that
colleagues of mine and I have advocated for), but also concise explanations of
all of the statistical methods employed in the statistical analyses. Such an
approach welcomes and encourages further scientific exploration and
falsification. The author astutely suggests potential future avenues such as
oral production, online measures (e.g. eye-tracking), and additional
sociolinguistic corpora studies. Given the existence of similar infinitive
constructions in varieties of Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas, I
imagine that it will not be long before this methodology is replicated in one
or more of these ways. It is refreshing that a 21st century linguistics
monograph appear in Spanish, although this seems a somewhat arbitrary choice
given that much of the data presented and discussed comes from Portuguese.
While this is a welcome addition to the literature on infinitive
constructions, I sincerely hope that the publication of this work in Spanish
does not limit its accessibility.

This monograph will be of primary interest to linguistic researchers around
the world working on Spanish and Portuguese – both Peninsular and
non-Peninsular varieties. Within the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, it will be
informative for studies of similar cross-linguistic phenomena and as a case
study in methodological design. For better or worse, I do not think the import
or appeal of this monograph will be properly appreciated beyond academia. This
book will likely have limited use as a textbook, excepting special cases such
as advanced graduate-level seminars with Spanish (or perhaps Portuguese) as
the language of instruction. As I have discussed previously, this book’s
appeal lies in the fact that its experimental methodology and conclusions can
inform syntactic and semantic studies from a variety of theoretical paradigms.

REFERENCES

Vesterinen, Rainer. 2006. Subordinação adverbial -- um estudo cognitivo sobre
o infinitivo, o clítico SE e as formas verbais finitas em proposições
adverbiais do Português europeu. Stockholm: University of Stockholm
dissertation.

Vesterinen, Rainer. 2011. A cognitive approach to adverbial subordination in
European Portuguese. The infinitive, the clitic pronoun SE and finite verbal
forms. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Timothy Gupton, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Spanish Syntax at University of
Georgia. He is particularly interested in the syntax of the preverbal field,
the interaction of information structure with narrow syntax, and the insight
that experimental measures can provide on monolingual and multilingual
competence.








----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-25-725	
----------------------------------------------------------