Languages in Contrast - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2018

This article examines the concept of defectivity in the verbal system of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. Building on previous studies on defective verbs in Spanish and Portuguese I investigate why there are no such defective verbs in Catalan. I conclude that the structure of the verbal paradigm in Catalan non-first conjugation verbs is radically different from that of the other languages; Catalan verbs constitute paradigms which correspond to regular patterns of inflection whereas Spanish and Portuguese display non-predictable types of root allomorphy which require all non-first conjugation verbs to have a memorised form for the rhizotonic forms of the verb. Theoretically, this type of defectivity poses problems for models of inflectional morphology and suggests that the patterns of frequent verbs can become general rules for all verbs of a particular conjugation.

In this paper, we focus on an eventual convergence outcome (the pluralization of presentational haber/haver-hi) in the grammar of two Romance languages, Spanish and Catalan, which have been living side-by-side for centuries in Eastern Spain. Taking into account the sociolinguistic comparative method and on the basis of several representative corpora of the two languages in contact, the data from this research offer evidence that points to a notable congruence between the underlying grammars of both languages, which would, at least partially, account for a similar diffusion of these vernacular pluralizations. Moreover, some of the few cases of disagreement found can be explained on the basis of both internal (such as the existence of points of structural conflict in some verbal paradigms) and external factors (such as hypercorrection), which certain social groups particularly sensitive to normative pressure are more receptive to.

The use of the Ibero-Romance complementiser que in non-embedded contexts with various illocutionary functions is argued to be non-trivially distinct from its canonical function as a marker of subordination. Interpretative and grammatical differences, and variation in the availability and clause-typing of non-embedded ‘exclamative’ and ‘quotative’ illocutionary que across Catalan, European Portuguese and Spanish provide evidence that the subordinating complementiser has been repurposed for the representation of pragmatic information in the complementiser systems of Ibero-Romance, a hypothesis supported by analogies drawn between illocutionary que and illocutionary functions of the interrogative complementiser si/se in Catalan and European Portuguese.

This article focuses on three constructions in Spanish and Portuguese that contain epistemic and evidential modifiers. It proposes that these constructions can be analyzed as cases of near-synonymy. Two of them are attested cross-linguistically: in the first, the modifiers function as predicative adjectives in impersonal copula clauses, while in the second, they are sentential adverbs. In the third type of construction, typical of the languages under investigation, the modifiers are followed by the complementizer que and introduce root clauses. The first part of the article describes the interpretive contrasts between the three constructions. The modifiers receive a different (inter)subjective reading depending on the construction in which they appear. Additionally, they operate on different levels of (non-)at-issue meaning. The second part of the article presents a quantitative study that complements the insights from the first part. In this empirical study, the influence of the text type, the modifier and the language on the choice of construction is modeled statistically. The results support the idea that the constructions are stylistic near-synonyms since their choice is strongly determined by the text type they appear in.

The aim of this paper is to examine the cross-cultural differences between (in)direct Spanish and French request formulations, adopting a pragmatic approach. More specifically, this study focusses on pragmatic equivalences in request formulations in informal and educational contexts, in French and Spanish corpora. In order to do so, a taxonomy was developed, based on the literature and on the analysis of the Spanish and French corpora. The analysis of the data shows that, on the one hand, direct strategies are among the most frequent request formulations in both corpora and, on the other, some formulations are similar in Spanish and in French but that their pragmatic interpretation or their frequency differs.