Fronting in Old Spanish

The article focuses on a cross-genre study of fronting phenomena in 13th Century Old Spanish. In particular, we study stage topics and deictic fronting, fronting in quotative inversion, quantifier fronting and information/broad/weak focus fronting comparatively, for the first time, in three types of texts (that is, (a) Cantar de Mío Cid, (b) La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, and (c) Estoria de España and General Estoria) while we compare with equivalent judgements from Modern Spanish in order to establish what exactly has changed. “Fronting” a term which has been used to describe all sorts of configurations ranging from stylistic fronting to focus fronting to non-focus fronting receives here a principled discussion. We show that, overall, fronting with a verum focus interpretation has largely been preserved into Modern Spanish, albeit often restricted, while the most notable change seems to be the loss of a preverbal focus position conveying broad focus. In doing so, we reconcile Leonetti’s (2017) claims for an informational partition, which does not divide the fronted element from the verb, but, rather, the fronted element together with the verb from the postverbal subject with our own claims about the syntactic mechanisms which yield this partition. We proceed to conclude that fronting operations are not a derivative of the V2 parameter being operative (contra Wolfe 2015).

这篇文章聚焦于对13世纪古西班牙语前置现象的跨体裁研究。特别是，我们首次对三种类型的文本（即（a）《熙德之歌》，（b）《海外事业》，以及（c）《西班牙史》和《通史》）中的阶段主题和指示前置、引语倒装中的前置、量词前置以及信息/宽泛/弱焦点前置进行了比较研究，同时我们与现代西班牙语的相应判断进行比较，以确定到底发生了哪些变化。“前置”这个术语曾被用于描述从文体前置到焦点前置再到非焦点前置等各种各样的结构，在此受到了有原则的讨论。我们表明，总体而言，具有真实性焦点解释的前置在很大程度上保留到了现代西班牙语中，尽管常常受到限制，而最显著的变化似乎是传达宽泛焦点的动词前焦点位置的丧失。在此过程中，我们将莱奥内蒂（2017）关于信息划分的主张（这种划分不是将前置元素与动词分开，而是将前置元素与动词一起与动词后的主语分开）与我们自己关于产生这种划分的句法机制的主张相协调。我们进而得出结论，前置操作不是起作用的V2参数的派生物（与沃尔夫2015年的观点相反）。