My current research efforts are centered on continuing research that I started in my dissertation work. I am studying the focalizing ser (‘to be’) structure (FS) in Colombian Spanish, and its relation to the standard pseudo-cleft (PS) structure:

 

 

(1) Lo                  que    Juan      estudió                     fue                         lingüística                 (PC)

         REL PRON    that     Juan      study-3SG-PAST   to be-3SG-PAST   linguistics

      ‘What Juan studied was linguistics’

 

(2) Juan         estudió                       fue                           lingüística                                              (FS)

       Juan         study-3SG-PAST     to be-3SG-PAST    linguistics

                    ‘It was linguistics that Juan studied’

             

 

             The FS (2), which holds an apparent syntactic resemblance to the pseudo-cleft construction (1), is found in very few Spanish dialects, although it is not socially stigmatized. Furthermore, the FS has not been extensively explored in the literature, and much confusion still exists regarding its syntactic configuration.

 

             In my dissertation I maintain the claim that the FS and the pseudo-cleft are different structures, I construct a thorough account of the syntactic configuration of the FS, and I propose that the FS is a sentence-internal (TP-internal) focus structure. 

 

             I am now extending the observations that I made in my dissertation to investigate in more detail the semantic properties of the FS, the pragmatic contexts in which it may produced, and the relationship between prosody and contrast. I am also interested in researching the cognitive aspects (e.g. parsing, memory load, etc.) that condition its production and perception among Colombian speakers.

Focalizing Ser