Advanced

Prior to enrolling in courses at this language level, students must have completed or tested out of a minimum of four semesters (or six quarters) of college-level Spanish at their home university in the U.S.

Topics in Advanced Spanish Grammar II (Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics) Only Winter semester
Language requirement: The student must be registered for Spanish III or have an equivalent level of Spanish.

DESCRIPTION AND GOALS
This course analyzes the fundamentals of Spanish Grammar and their role in word order possibilities in Spanish Syntax. Specifically, we are going to focus on word order at the sentence level and see that free word order in Spanish is only apparent. The aim of this course is to provide explanations geared on the syntax-semantics interface as to why certain orders can never occur and why some orders are less marked than others. This will help the student determine the context of distribution of Spanish word orders which should constitute a great aid when it comes to writing essays and compositions in Spanish. A contrastive analysis of word order in English and Spanish will be presented when relevant.

1. New and old information, Focus and Topic, Theme and Rheme.

2. The Left Periphery of Sentence structure in Spanish
a. Topicalization
b. Left Dislocation
c. Contrastive Focus
d. Wh-questions

3. Diathesis in Spanish
a. Passivization
b. Se constructions

4. Agreement and clitic morphology on the Spanish verb
a. Clitic doubled objects
b. Subject verb agreement
c. Agreement in inversion predicates

5. The position of Verb arguments and the focus-topic paradigm
a. Postverbal subjects
b. Object scrambling
c. Unaccusative, existential, and presentational verbs

6. The syntax of non-finite complementation
a. Clause Union and verb incorporation
b. Predicate raising and Inner topicalization
c. Other raising constructions

7. Adverb placement

METHODOLOGY

The final grade will be calculated according to the following percentages:

-Class lectures on the topics mentioned above.
-Take home assignments.
For instance, students will be given a number of compositions by learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language, from which errors in word order will be extracted and analyzed according to syntactic principles and constraints covered in class.

ASSESSMENT

Assignments 30%
Participation 30%
Final exam 40%

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campos, Héctor. 1993. De la oración simple a la oración compuesta. Georgetown University Press, Baltimore.
Haegeman, L. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge (Mass.)/Oxford 1991.
Franco, Jon 2000. 'Agreement as a Continuum: the Case of Spanish Pronominal Clitics'.In Frits Beukema and Marcel Den Dikken (eds.) Clitic Phenomena in European Languages. John Benjamin. Amsterdam pp. 147-189
Hualde, José Ignacio, Antxon Olarrea y Anna María Escobar. 2001. Introducción a la lingüística hispánica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whitley, M. Stanley, and Luis González. 2000. Gramática para la composición. Georgetown University Press, Baltimore.
Zagona, Karen 2002. Spanish Syntax. Cambridge University Press