Ana Ojea | University of Oviedo / Universidad de Oviedo (original) (raw)

Papers by Ana Ojea

The Syndroling Project” (TSP) is attempting to establish linguistic profiles of typical developme... more The Syndroling Project” (TSP) is attempting to establish linguistic profiles of typical development at the phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic levels from a corpus of 60 typically developing children. Typical development profiles are then compared with the profiles obtained from corpora of three neurodevelopmental syndromes: Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, and Fragile X syndrome. The Syndroling Project is the first attempt to compare Spanish-speaking subjects with DS, WS, and FXS with typically developing subjects at all levels of linguistic analysis, and based on conversational corpora.

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2020

This paper offers a formal analysis of three constructions in English: locative inversion, centra... more This paper offers a formal analysis of three constructions in English: locative inversion, central deictic inversion and directional inversion. These constructions constitute thetic statements with a locative intentional base which sets a scene that (re)introduces an entity in the discourse; syntactically, they display a non-canonical word order and have a number of unusual grammatical properties which make them particularly interesting to show how syntax connects, and adapts, to discourse. I propose that they all obtain from a language particular mechanism which involves a functional category LocP that adjusts the computational requirement to have a preverbal subject to the intentional need to have the subject post-verbally. As for the differences among them, they are approached in terms of the features that head LocP and the lexical properties of the verbs that head each of the structures. Ultimately, the paper also serves to discuss the role of certain informational features (the...

Journal of English Studies, 2011

This paper offers a characterization of Propositional Gerunds in English and Spanish that hinges ... more This paper offers a characterization of Propositional Gerunds in English and Spanish that hinges on the different feature specification of the gerund morpheme in each language. I first propose an analysis of the construction in English as a defective clausal structure (AspP or TP), which can optionally project a [+N] feature in a GerP. Then I justify the same syntactic analysis for Spanish, but in this case the adverbial source of the V-ndo head prevents the projection of this nominal feature. My proposal is that most of the peculiarities of Propositional Gerunds in both languages actually follow from their defective structure and from the feature specification forced by the gerund suffix in each case. Along these lines I contrastively account for the syntactic positions in which a Propositional Gerund may appear, and also for its main structural characteristics, as the morphological Case of its subject or the (im)possibility of temporal/aspectual modification in the construction.

RLA. Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada, 2016

Revista Canaria De Estudios Ingleses, 2013

Proceedings from the 31st Aedean Conference Recurso Electronico 2008 Isbn 978 84 9749 278 2 Pags 807 814, 2008

SKY Journal of Linguistics, 2011

Free Relatives (FRs) are constructions that share the essentials of core relative sentences but h... more Free Relatives (FRs) are constructions that share the essentials of core relative sentences but have no lexical antecedent (ie they are headless) and are subject to a matching condition which forces the relative operator to satisfy the selectional restrictions of both the ...

Language Sciences, 2013

Abstract This article focuses on the syntactic analysis of Free Relatives, Semi-Free Relatives an... more Abstract This article focuses on the syntactic analysis of Free Relatives, Semi-Free Relatives and Free-Choice Relatives in Spanish. All of them are headless relatives, that is, constructions which have a sentential form but nominal interpretation and distribution. My proposal is that they can be treated as mixed categories with two substructures: an illocutionary verbal domain (a relative clause) and a nominal domain, connected through a nominalizer functional projection. Headless relatives are thus conceived here as syntactically equivalent to headed relatives, with a recategorizer NomP in place of the lexical antecedent and the differences between the three particular constructions are shown to follow from alternative (an independently motivated) strategies of valuation of an edge feature in NomP. The article also explores the implications of an analysis of this sort for a cross-linguistic account of headless relatives.

Revista española de lingüística, 1997

Revista española de lingüística, 2001

Languages, 2024

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the so-called syntactization of discourse, that... more This paper presents empirical evidence to support the so-called syntactization of discourse, that is, the projection of relevant pragmatic features in the narrow syntax. In particular, it analyses deictic inversion in English, a construction which is used by the speaker to point at a proximal or distal location and bring the addressee’s attention to an entity related to that location (e.g., Here comes the bus). It offers a novel account of this construction, which takes it to be an evidential strategy in a language that does not have standard evidential markers; this evidential status explains its main differences with locative inversion, a construction with which it is pragmatically and structurally related. Deictic inversion therefore receives a natural explanation in a framework that maps syntax with the speech act and introduces in the derivation pragmatic information about the participants in the communicative exchange and about the source of the information for the proposition asserted.
Keywords: speech act; evidentiality; deictic inversion; locative inversion; syntax-pragmatics interface

SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2022

Infinitival relative clauses are untensed relative clauses which generally have a root modal valu... more Infinitival relative clauses are untensed relative clauses which generally have a root modal value. The construction has a distinctive characteristic that makes it particularly interesting from a syntactic point of view: the impossibility to have a lexical wh-DP operator in initial position unless it is integrated in a prepositional phrase. In this paper I describe the structure and interpretation of infinitival relative clauses and discuss why such restriction, which is not present in tensed relative clauses, exists. The proposal I make is that the modal reading of these sentences and the DP/PP asymmetry they exhibit in CP are connected to the prepositional origin of particles to and for, and to the categorial features that they have retained in Present-Day English after a process of grammaticalization; the DP/PP asymmetry, in particular, will follow from the need to value the categorial features with which C is endowed here with some prepositional category under strict conditions of locality. The analysis provided thus explains the peculiarities of infinitival relative clauses with no need to resort to any construction specific mechanism, in line with the restrictive approach to linguistic facts of the Minimalist programme.

Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxía

Este trabajo analiza la estructura de constituyentes de las cláusulas de relativo restrictivas pa... more Este trabajo analiza la estructura de constituyentes de las cláusulas de relativo restrictivas para explicar por qué en español, frente a lo que ocurre en otras lenguas como el inglés, el sujeto y el verbo pueden ordenarse en ellas de manera distinta a como lo hacen en las oraciones independientes. Se defiende que en las relativas restrictivas, cláusulas subordinadas de contenido presupuesto, el constituyente más prominente desde el punto de vista informativo es el sintagma relativo, que reactiva la referencia del antecedente para conectarlo con la información del fondo común; el relativo será, por tanto, la base intencional bajo la que se organiza el resto del contenido de la oración. Asumiendo las premisas básicas de economía de las teorías generativistas recientes, se analizan en esta línea los factores de tipo discursivo que explican la posición del sujeto en estas cláusulas, así como la imposibilidad de que en ellas se dé el fenómeno de inversión locativa que sí es posible, sin...

Atlantis. Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies

Southwest Journal of Linguistics, Dec 1, 2003