Emphatic Polarity and C in Spanish - Lear

EMPHATIC POLARITY AND C IN SPANISH
are usually interpreted by Peninsular Spanish speakers, 16 like the examples
in (17), as emphatic sentences with a subjective flavor. Crucial evidence
supporting the parallelism between preverbal bien in (17) and degree-bien in
(22) is provided by the fact that the latter, like the former, is incompatible
with both negative and positive markers:
(24) a. *La habitación no estaba bien sucia.
The room was not well dirty
b. *El jefe sí trató bien duramente a Pepito.
The boss yes treated well harshly Pepito
It is worth noting, in this respect, that if it were the case that bien and muy
patterned alike, we would expect the examples in (25) to be ill-formed
alongside those in (24), contrary to what is the actual case:
(25) a. La habitación no estaba muy sucia.
‘The room was not very dirty’
b. El jefe sí trató muy duramente a Pepito.
The boss yes treated very rudely Pepito
‘The boss did treat Pepito very harshly’
Moreover, bien and muy also differ in that the former, as opposed to the
latter, may trigger movement to CP. This property is mainly responsible for
the contrast in (26):
(26) a. ¡Y bien bonito que era el barco! 17
And well nice that was the ship!
‘But the ship was really nice!’
b. *¡Y muy bonito que era el barco!
And very nice that was the ship!
The example in (26a) shows that bien shares relevant properties with whwords.
This pattern is reminiscent of the well-known behavior of
exclamative pronouns like qué (“what”) and emphatic neuter article lo 18 in
Spanish, as illustrated in (27):
16 In some varieties of American Spanish, bien has undergone a process of grammaticalization,
as a consequence of which its original lexical meaning is lost. In these
varieties, bien behaves as a degree-word nearly equivalent to muy (“very”).
17 This example is from Seco (1999), s.v. bien.
18 For a study of the emphatic uses of the neuter determiner lo in Spanish, see Bosque and
Moreno (1990), Brucart (1993), and Gutiérrez-Rexach (1999).
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