Fronting in Old Spanish

Abstract

The article focuses on a cross-genre study of fronting phenomena in 13th Century Old Spanish. In particular, we study stage topics and deictic fronting, fronting in quotative inversion, quantifier fronting and information/broad/weak focus fronting comparatively, for the first time, in three types of texts (that is, (a) Cantar de Mío Cid, (b) La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, and (c) Estoria de España and General Estoria) while we compare with equivalent judgements from Modern Spanish in order to establish what exactly has changed. “Fronting” a term which has been used to describe all sorts of configurations ranging from stylistic fronting to focus fronting to non-focus fronting receives here a principled discussion. We show that, overall, fronting with a verum focus interpretation has largely been preserved into Modern Spanish, albeit often restricted, while the most notable change seems to be the loss of a preverbal focus position conveying broad focus. In doing so, we reconcile Leonetti’s (2017) claims for an informational partition, which does not divide the fronted element from the verb, but, rather, the fronted element together with the verb from the postverbal subject with our own claims about the syntactic mechanisms which yield this partition. We proceed to conclude that fronting operations are not a derivative of the V2 parameter being operative (contra Wolfe 2015).