2020/03/25 by Charlotte Galves · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Linguistic Variation and Morphology
paper · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198844303.003.0016
openalex publication_date 2020/03/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Based on the quantitative and qualitative study of 11 syntactically parsed texts (485,767 words) from the <italic>Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese</italic>, this chapter argues that Classical Portuguese, i.e. the language instantiated in texts written in Portugal by authors born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a V2 language of the kind that Wolfe calls ‘relaxed V2 languages’. These are languages in which V1 and V3 sentences coexist with V2 patterns. To account for the sentential patterns observed and their interpretation, a new cartographic analysis of the left periphery is proposed. The existence of sentences in which quantified objects precede fronted subjects suggests that there are two distinct positions in the CP layer to which preverbal phrases can move. The higher one is the familiar Focus category. It is argued that the lower one is neuter with respect to the topic/focus dichotomy and merely encodes a contrast feature. Other constituents can be adjoined at the higher portion of the left periphery where they are interpreted as topics or frames. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of textually diversified corpora as the basis of historical syntactic studies.