An LFG Analysis of Basic and Non-Basic Sentences in Spanish
Spanish (Español) is a configurational language. It is spoken by around 420 millions people worldwide and it is the fourth most widely spoken language in the world, after Mandarin, English and Hindi. (Myers, 2015) Spanish is spoken in Spain and most of the South and Central American countries, and is thus the official language of numerous countries, including Spain, Mexico, Costa Rica and Venezuela. (Worldatlas, 2015) The following essay will demonstrate and analyze basic and non-basic sentences in Spanish using Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) framework. Some of the example from this essay is created on my own, examples from other sources will be stated.
Basic Sentences
Spanish is a configuarational language but compare with English, the word order in Spanish is more flexible. Suñer (1982) suggest that the basic word order in Spanish is Subject – Verb – Object (S – V – O). Like English, other then transitive verbs, Spanish also have intransitive and ditransitive verbs.
Here are some examples:
Transitive
(1) La chica lista ha escrito un libro
DET.def.fem.sg-The fem.sg-girl fem.sg.-clever 2/3sg-has perf-written DET.masc.sg-a masc.sg-book
The clever girl has written a book.
Intransitive
(2) Juan murió Juan 2/3sg-died
Juan died.
Dirtransitive
(3) Yo pongo el libro en la mesa
1sg.-I 1sg-put DET.def.masc.sg-the masc.sg.-book on DET.def.fem.sg-The fem.sg.-table
I put the
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