INTERACTIONS AMONG FOCUS, EXHAUSTIVITY, AND CONSTITUENT ORDER IN SPANISH AND BASQUE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Lorena Sainz-Maza Lecanda Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese The Ohio State University 2017 Dissertation Committee: Professor Peter W. Culicover, Co-advisor Professor Scott A. Schwenter, Co-advisor Professor Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza Copyrighted by Lorena Sainz-Maza Lecanda 2017 ABSTRACT The notion of exhaustivity has been traditionally discussed in relation to contrastive or identificational focus in proposing that this kind of focus performs the identification of the only or maximal entity satisfying a given predication (e.g. Kiss, 1998). Be this as it may, it has been recently suggested that this semantic-pragmatic property also plays a significant role in the differing structural configurations of information focus, specially as it pertains to paradigmatic cases of information focus represented through wh-question and answer pairs (e.g. Kiss, 2007; Yasavul, 2013; Destruel et al., 2015). In Hungarian, for instance, it has been argued that the variable structural positioning between immediate preverbal focus and in-situ focus is conditioned by exhaustivity. Horvath (2007) defends that immediate preverbal focus, but not in-situ focus, expresses exhaustivity. While this may be true of Hungarian, it remains an open question whether exhaustivity conditions the structural configuration a language uses to express information focus. In contributing to this question, this dissertation provides an investigation of the interactions among information focus, exhaustivity and constituent order in two typologically unrelated languages, namely Basque and Spanish. In particular, it investigates the variable structural positioning of constituents conveying information focus and seeks to describe how linguistic and social factors, and specially exhaustivity, affect the syntactic configurations of these two languages. Traditionally, it has been said that constituents conveying information focus take an immediate preverbal position in Basque and a postverbal, sentence-final position in Spanish. ii Therefore, in the context of a question such as who turns in homework late every day?, Basque speakers would place focus in immediate preverbal position as in [FOCUS Mikelek] [V entregatzen ditu] berandu egunero ‘[FOCUS Mike] always turns them in late’, while Spanish speakers would express it sentence-finally Los [V entrega] siempre tarde [FOCUS Miguel] ‘[FOCUS Mike] always turns them in late’, rendering in-situ variants such as [FOCUS Mikelek] egunero [V entregatzen ditu] berandu and [FOCUS Miguel] siempre los [V entrega] tarde unacceptable. Yet, in my dissertation, I use experimental data from a series of forced-choice acceptability judgment tasks and interpretation tasks to show that in-situ counterparts are indeed acceptable, making the claim that there is variation between immediate preverbal and in-situ information focus in Basque and sentence-final and in-situ information focus in Spanish. Crucially, my results from a series of mixed-effects logistic regression analyses reveal that this variation is not free and unconstrained in either language. Rather, in both languages, it is conditioned by the semantic-pragmatic notion of exhaustivity; that is, the implication that the element constituting information focus is the only or maximal entity satisfying the predication. For Basque, my data show that immediate preverbal information focus [FOCUS Mikelek] [V entregatzen ditu] berandu egunero implies exhaustivity, which suggests a translation along the lines of ‘it is Mike (and no one else) who turns in homework late every day’, while the in-situ variant [FOCUS Mikelek] egunero [Ventregatzen ditu] berandu takes a non- exhaustive interpretation such as ‘Mike, among others, turns in homework later every day’. The same interpretive correspondence applies to Spanish: the sentence-final variant Los [V entrega] siempre tarde [FOCUS Miguel] receives an exhaustive reading, while its in-situ counterpart [FOCUS Miguel] siempre los [V entrega] tarde does not. With this information, I implement a formal syntactic treatment of exhaustive information focus structures using the feature-driven iii approach couched within Minimalism, and I compare this with a constructional version following the Construction Grammar framework. In light of the immediate preverbal vs. sentence-final alignment of information focus in Basque and Spanish respectively, the last part of this dissertation explores contact effects between these two languages and, in particular, the linguistic and social factors that influence the acceptability and production patterns of a non-standard alternative preverbal exhaustive information focus variant (e.g. [FOCUS Miguel] (los) [V entrega] siempre tarde ‘It is Miguel who turns them in late every day’) documented among Basque Spanish speakers (e.g. Zarate, 1976). In pursuit of this second inquiry, I conduct a Likert-scale acceptability judgment task and submit the data to a series of ordinal logistic regression analyses in Rstudio in order to explore the correlations between this preverbal variant and various linguistic and social categories. Results suggest that participants’ likelihood to accept and/or produce the non- standard preverbal information focus in this contact variety is dependent on the type of focused phrase (i.e. NP, AdjP, AdvP, PP), the presence or absence of accusative clitics lo, la, los or las, as well as speakers’ origin (Basque vs. Non-Basque), their age, self-identification with Basque cultural ties, living environment and Basque proficiency. From a contact- linguistics standpoint, these findings indicate that this alternative variant results from the complementarity and interplay of both processes of imposition (source-language agentivity) and borrowing (recipient-language agentivity), wherein it is not only Basque-dominant bilinguals, but also Spanish-dominant bilinguals and older Spanish monolinguals from rural areas with strong Basque cultural ties that seem to be acting as primary agents in the emergence, diffusion and maintenance of this non-standard preverbal focus structure. iv DEDICATION Dedico esta tesis a mis aitas y a mi hermana por su apoyo incondicional v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am beyond grateful to the three members of my committee: Peter Culicover, Scott Schwenter and Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza, all of whom have exceedingly contributed to my academic and professional growth and success. First, thanks to my advisor, Peter Culicover, for believing in me, for always showing interest in my work and supporting my research, for meeting with me every week to talk over syntax, and for teaching me to always think about Linguistics with a critical eye. Thanks for all the time you have invested reading the various drafts of this dissertation and for providing the most detailed feedback. Second, I would like to thank my co-advisor, Scott Schwenter, for introducing me to the world of variationist sociolinguistics and for recognizing my quality as a scholar. And, last but not least, I am deeply indebted to Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza. Gracias por tu dedicación y profesionalidad. A pesar de no ser mi co-advisor, te has comportado como tal y para mí, como bien sabes, has sido y serás un modelo a seguir tanto en lo académico y profesional, como en lo personal. To all three of you, thank you for your mentorship and unwavering support. Besides my committee members, I have also tremendously learnt from other faculty members in the department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Linguistics department at Ohio State. I am thankful for having had the opportunity to work with Javier Gutierrez- Rexach (Allá donde estés, gracias por todos tus consejos y tu profesionalidad, y a la vez también por hacerme llorar de la risa en tus clases) and Donald Winford, who sparked my interest in contact linguistics and always offered valuable feedback that I have been able to put to good use in vi this dissertation. These opportunities would not have been possible without the financial, academic and professional support of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at OSU. Thank you for the well-rounded education, teaching opportunities and financial assistance I have received during my time as a graduate student and graduate teaching associate at OSU. Beyond Ohio State, I also want to express my gratitude to professor Jon Franco at the University of Deusto for encouraging me to pursue graduate studies in Linguistics at Ohio State in the first place. You were certainly right when you told me that this would be a life- changing experience. I also owe my deepest thanks to Itxaso Rodríguez, who has not only been a good friend, but also an amazing collaborator and colleague to work with. Mila esker por esas sesiones interminables de Skype, y por devolverme la cordura en muchos momentos. To my Chicago girls, Lucía and Lina, mil gracias por acogerme en Chicago siempre que lo he necesitado, and to my Nebraska girl, Jenni, eskerrik asko por recordarme que a veces hay que pisar el freno. During my six years at OSU, I have met wonderful people who have made this experience one to remember: Cate and Miguel, thanks for your love, support and kindness; Ramón and Naisha, thanks for “janguear” conmigo when I first arrived in Columbus and enseñarme the beauty of el Spanglish puertorriqueño; and, my past and present SPPO colleagues (Meag,