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Auxiliary Verbs in the Left Periphery: Spanish Ir and Venir As Focus Markers

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Auxiliary Verbs in the Left Periphery: Spanish Ir and Venir As Focus Markers Auxiliary Verbs in the Left Periphery: Spanish ir and venir as Focus Markers Ana Bravo ∗ 1. Spanish standard and non-standard constructions with ir ‘to go’ + infinitive∗∗ Apart from the well known and fully acknowledged temporal-aspectual meaning of either futurity or prospectivity, the construction1 with the auxiliary verb ir ‘to go’ [ir a + infinitive] may be used to convey the two less standard meanings of resultativity and focus, as exemplified in (1) and (2). It must be observed that they are common to all varieties of Spanish, although it seems that in some of these varieties venir subtitutes ir as a focus marker (2c):2 (1) RESULTATIVE IR a. El hombre […] cerró los ojos, trastabilló y fue a golpearse con [… ] la campana. [CREA, Vicente Molina Foix, La quincena soviética, Spain] 3 ‘The man closed his eyes, stumbled and ended up hitting himself against the bell.’ b. El vehículo se salió de la cinta asfáltica y fue a chocar con el puente Camella. [CREA, La Hora, 30/04/1997, Guatemala] ‘The vehicle went off of the road and, at the end, it crashed into Camella Bridge.’ (2) FOCUS IR ~ VENIR a. Fíjese que el güey del Aristóteles […] le fue a poner a su hijo mayor Cristo Rey. ¡Pobre cuate! [CREA, Arturo Azuela, La casa de las mil vírgenes, México] ‘That guy of Aristoteles had to give his older son the name of Cristo Rey, as if there were no more names. ¡Poor guy!’ b. Fue a aparecer en el peor momento. [RAE-ASALE, § 28.8j] ‘He had to appear at the worst moment.’ c. El carro se nos vino a romper en el peor momento. [RAE-ASALE, § 28.8j]. ‘Our car had to break down precisely at the worst moment.’ In this paper I am going to defend that the constructions in (1) and (2) are different. In doing so, I attempt a more general goal which is to allow for a new approach in the study of the so called ∗ Ana Bravo, Universidad de Murcia, [email protected]. I would like to thank Ignacio Bosque, Javier Gutiérrez- Rexach, Brenda Laca and the audience at the HLS 2012 for comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Paloma Andrés, Luis García and David Prieto García-Seco, who helped me with the data. The Department of Spanish and Linguistics at University of Murcia has given me conference support. Previous versions of this paper were presented in (2011) in Madrid at the Sociedad Española de Lingüística conference and in Logroño in the “‘Come’ and ‘go’ off the beaten grammaticalisation path” workshop at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europeae. All remaining errors and shortcomings are mine. 1 With the term construction I am referring here to the general notion of ‘syntactic string’, and not to the more specific concept of ‘form-meaning pair’. 2 Arnaiz and Camacho (1999) have correctly shown that ir ‘to go’ functions as a topic auxiliary in the construction with the form ir ‘to go’ + y ‘and’ + a tensed verb, as in Juan va y se casa ‘John goes and gets married’. If there is a topic, Juan in the given example, then a focus is also to be expected, namely, casarse ‘to get married’ and, accordingly, this ir could be considered as a focus auxiliary too —a conclusion which is not in the aforementioned paper. I leave for further research the study of both the grammatical properties of this construction and the possible connections among resultative, topic and focus markers. 3 Glosses are approximate. © 2013 Ana Bravo. Selected Proceedings of the 16th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. Jennifer Cabrelli Amaro et al., 46-55. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 47 ‘discourse markers’ periphrases in Spanish. In particular, my aim is to show the relation between this group of constructions involving auxiliary verbs and the left periphery. I am going to argue that in (1) the verb ir introduces a result and forms a complex predicate with the infinitive verb and its complement in the syntax; in (2), on the contrary, the verb ir is a focus marker lexically specified, hence, as [+focus] [+scalarity]. From now onwards I will refer to this ir as IR focus and, following the convention, I will signal the focused constituent with brackets and the subscript letter f as in (2b’) below: (2) b’. Fue a aparecer [f en el peor momento]. ‘He had to appear at the worst moment of all’ I assume as correct that the prosodic prominence with which the abstract4 focus feature f is expressed in Spanish corresponds to the rightmost constituent (Zubizarreta 1998). I also assume that my analysis applies to VENIR ‘to come’ focus, as ir can substitute for venir in (2c) without any changes in the meaning. 2. Former accounts 2.1. IR focus as a scalar periphrasis The most widespread analysis (Fernández de Castro 1999, RAE-ASALE 2009) firstly, identifies IR focus with IR resultative; secondly, it includes IR focus —and, consequently, IR resultative— in the group of the verbal periphrases formed by [empezar ~ acabar ~ seguir + gerund] and its variants (Eng. begin to, end up, continue). These periphrases, called scalar or serial in RAE-ASALE (2009), present the situation described in relationship to other situations and, for such a reason, are considered as ‘discourse markers’ (see also Carrasco Gutiérrez 2006). In particular, the situation may collocate at the beginning of a series of subsequent events, as with [empezar ‘start to’+ gerund], at the end of it ([acabar ‘end up’ + gerund]) or in the middle ([seguir ‘continue’ + gerund]). In effect, apparently, IR focus, and IR resultative since in this analysis they are the same construction, describes the final endpoint of a previous process consisting itself of a series of events, that may or may not be contextually explicit. What makes IR focus distinct from [acabar + gerund], a terminative periphrasis as well, is that IR focus, in presenting the final event as a result, allows to highlight it. For the RAE-ASALE (2009), IR resultative, indistinct from IR focus, combines only with a reduced number of predicates, namely those that denote contact, either literally as chocar ‘hit against’ or figuratively as aparecer ‘to appear’, or, in general, a punctual situation (romperse ‘to break down’). Conceivably, the restriction has to be a consequence of this resultative meaning of IR resultative. On the other hand, IR focus expresses perfective aspect, it asserts that the eventuality took place if the verb is in the past and it is not restricted in its temporal paradigm, all of which makes it impossible to consider IR focus as a particular case of IR prospective, against Cartagena 1999, Camus 2006, Melis 2006 and Aaron 2006. 2.2. Problems of former accounts I will very briefly go over some of the difficulties that these former accounts run into. To begin with, it is obvious that the construction exists and that it is highly productive. Thus, to the examples in (2) we can add the real language examples of (3): (3) a. Tengo tanta mala suerte que fue a nevar [f el único día que […]]. [Google, October 5, 2012] ‘I am so unlucky that (of all of the days of the year) it had to snow precisely the day that…’ b. ¡[f Mal momento] fue a elegir […]! [Google, October 5, 2012] ‘He had to choose the worst moment out of all the possible moments.’ 4 An assumption that is not evident at all. See Gutiérrez-Rexach (2008: 123, fn. 6) and Toosarvandani (2010). 48 Secondly, both the equivalence between IR focus and IR resultative, on the one hand, and between these two auxiliaries and [acabar + gerund], on the other, raise many problems and, ultimately, does not account either for the meaning of IR focus or for its grammar. If the only difference between IR focus and [acabar + gerund] is the resultative feature in the meaning of the former, the contrast in (4) is surprising: (4) a. *Luis fue a aparecer. lit. Luis went to appear b. Luis acabó apareciendo. ‘At the end, Luis appeared.’ Furthermore, making explicit the series of previous events does not turn (4a) into a grammatical sentence, contrary to what might be expected: (5) *Después de enviarle varios mensajes y de llamarle a su casa, Luis fue a aparecer. lit. after of send to him several messages and of call him to his house, Luis went to appear Crucially, however, this result is obtained reverting the word order in (4a), as (6) shows: (6) Fue a aparecer [f Luis]. lit. went to appear Luis ‘It was Luis the one who had to appear.’ In general, IR focus is not interchangeable with [acabar + gerund], a fact that can be easily explained if it is assumed that only the terminative periphrasis, but not IR focus, selects as a component of its meaning a domain consistent of a series of temporally previous events with respect to which the event it denotes occupies the last place. IR focus, on its part, selects for other possible alternatives to the event described (see § 3.1. below). In this way the oddness of (7a) can receive a straightforward explanation: (7) a.?? Después de darle muchas vueltas, le fue a poner [f Cristo Rey]. lit. after of give to it a lot of turns, he went to put Cristo Rey b. Después de darle muchas vueltas, le acabó poniendo Cristo Rey. lit. after of give to it a lot of turns, he ended putting Cristo Rey ‘After thinking a lot about it, he ended up calling him Cristo Rey.’ If we turn now to the restrictions posited by the RAE-ASALE (2009), it is obvious that they do not give an appropriate account of the facts either.
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