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It has been recently suggested that exhaustivity plays a significant role in the differing structural configurations of information focus (e.g. Kiss, 2007; Yasavul, 2013; Destruel et al., 2015). Horvath (2007) defends that Hungarian 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 other languages use 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 Basque and Spanish. Using experimental data from a series of forced-choice acceptability judgment tasks and interpretation tasks, it is shown 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, results from a series of inferential analyses reveal, in both languages, this structural variation is indeed conditioned by exhaustivity. 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 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). Results from a Likert-scale acceptability judgment task suggest that participants’ likelihood to accept and/or produce the non-standard preverbal information focus 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. |
