The copula in certain Caribbean Spanish focus constructions

Abstract

Certain varieties of Spanish (mostly Caribbean) exhibit a focus construction where an inflected copula and an inflected lexical verb look like clause-mates (no pause or coordinating/subordinating particle mediate between them), which would be quite unexpected for a language like Spanish. This chapter proposes that the copula and the lexical verb are not clause-mates, but rather pertain to two different clauses: the leftmost one contains the lexical verb while the rightmost one is a cleft. The two clauses combine to form a construction similar to so-called ‘Horn-amalgams’. An analysis of these constructions is offered parallel to Kluck’s (2011) analysis of Horn-amalgams: there is ‘paratactic coordination’ (whence the lack of coordinating/subordinating particles) and the copula is a cleft copula introducing a cleft pivot and an (eventually sluiced) cleft-clause. This accounts for the fact that the focused item bears exhaustive focus and is interpreted as functionally related to the lexical verb.