Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo

Focalizing Ser ('to Be') in Colombian Spanish: an Empirical Study of a Dialectally-marked Syntactic Phenomenon in Spanish Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo

Interesting developments have taken place during the last twenty years regarding the information structure of CP and IP. In terms of topic and focus structures, evidence from various languages shows that topic and focus may originate within IP. The present study analyzes the Focalizing Ser ('to be') structure, a syntactic phenomenon only found in a few Spanish dialects (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and the Dominican Republic). This study carefully examines the syntactic properties of this construction and explores its semantic and discourse characteristics. The results of the analysis indicate that this dialectally-marked form is much more complex than initially thought and that it constitutes an excellent case of IP-internal focalization.