El foco, la estructura informativa y el ser focalizador en el español cibaeño

According to Zubizarreta (1998), a constituent that satisfies information focus must appear at the rightmost sentence edge in Spanish, the result of which predicts SVO order for replies to object narrow-focus questions and VOS for replies to subject narrow-focus questions. In the current article, we examine the results of an experimental study exploring the syntax-information structure interface in Cibaeño Spanish. The results include two findings that do not support the predictions of Zubizarreta (1998): 1) SV or VS word order is possible for subject narrow-focus contexts 2) contrastive/corrective focus is encoded in situ, with (S)VO, which does not support a strict SV(O) syntax. After examining the empirical results, we explore the technical implications of encoding exhaustivity in the syntactic model of Cibaeño Spanish.