Rodrigo Gutierrez-Bravo investigates a number of word order phenomenon in Spanish, concentrating on the language's unmarked word order and the perturbations of this order that result from topicalization and wh-movement. He demonstrates that word order in Spanish is not regulated by licensing conditions related to the subject (ie Case, agreement, etc), but rather results from the interaction between the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and structural markedness considerations. He proposes that Spanish clauses have different degrees of structural markedness, depending on the semantic role of...

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.