A UNIFIED ANALYSIS OF BASQUE AND SPANISH INFORMATION FOCUS VIA EXHAUSTIVITY (original) (raw)

Previous formal syntactic accounts on Spanish information focus have generally argued that the presence of a formal focus feature triggers movement to the left-periphery followed by remnant leftward movement of non-focal material (i.e. Ordoñez, 1997; Ortega-Santos, 2016). Similarly, in Basque, immediate preverbal focus constructions have been explained via [+focus] feature that prompts movement of the focused phrase to an A’-position (i.e. Eguzkitza, 1986; Ortiz de Urbina, 1989). Yet, in this paper, using two forced-choice acceptability judgment tasks, I investigate the linearization patterns of information focus in Spanish and in Basque, and demonstrate that the syntactic configuration of these typologically unrelated languages is not mediated via focus per se, but the semantic-pragmatic notion of exhaustivity. Following these findings, I present an original formal treatment of Basque and Spanish focalization using the non-modular, holistic approach couched within Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 2005; Culicover, 2011; Boas & Sag, 2012; inter alia), and propose that while these two languages are different on the surface, they resort to identical underlying mechanisms, namely exhaustivity, in their computation of focus constructions. In all, these findings have theoretical implications for linguistic typology by contributing to our understanding of the role of exhaustivity as part of the so-called ‘linguistic universals’ dictating the configuration of focus-marking constructions across languages.