Word order variation with decir ‘say’ in spoken Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate word order with the verb decir ‘say’ in two corpora of spoken Peninsular Spanish. This verb is particularly interesting because it has been observed to have a high frequency of postverbal subjects in previous studies. Beside features that influence optional subject-verb inversion, such as the type of subject, the type of complement and the type of sentence in which decir appears, we investigate whether factors related to residual V2 trigger the postverbal subject position in some contexts. It will be shown that fronted objects, but not preverbal adverbs, trigger subject-verb inversion in the speech data investigated here. Furthermore, the factor of subject type and complement type are relevant for explaining word order patterns. Lastly, we also discuss the existence of semi-fixed, ‘constructionalized’ word order patterns with decir and how they can be accounted for in a framework that makes use of perspectival functional categories in the left periphery.

Keywords

• word order
• residual V2
• subject-verb inversion
• spoken Spanish
• corpus study