Corpus Data and the Position of Information Focus in Spanish

Abstract

Abstract The syntactic position of information foci is the most vividly discussed issue in recent literature on focus in Spanish. An interesting aspect of this discussion is that the diverging views typically correlate with diverging methods: Authors who rely on their intuitions as native speakers typically assume that information foci are limited to the final position, while authors using experimental methods typically argue (based on their experimental data) that information foci are not limited to the final position. The present paper contributes to this debate by adding a new data type, namely corpus data. The main empirical finding of our corpus study is that information foci appear most frequently in final position but are not limited to the final position. The latter finding is in line with comparable experimental studies, but the preference for the final position in our corpus data is not found in all experimental studies. Further, our results challenge the common view in the introspection-based literature according to which the information focus needs to be in final position in Spanish. In addition to this empirical contribution we offer a reflection on the merits of corpus data in this domain of linguistic research.