On adverbial inflection in Spanish: Syntactic agreement and post-syntactic feature manipulation

This paper studies the unexpected gender/number inflection of degree adverbs (demasiado and poco) in non-standard Spanish: demasiada.F.SG inteligente.INV.SG jefa.F.SG (lit. too intelligent boss), poca.F.SG satisfactoria.F.SG actitud.F.SG (lit. not-very satisfactory attitude). These inflected forms contrast with the standard invariable forms without any semantic differences: demasiado.INV inteligente .INV.SG jefa.F.SG, poco.INV satisfactoria.F.SG actitud.F.SG. Based on a corpus study, it is shown that inflected forms are systematic when the sequence appears in a prenominal position within the DP/NP [(D) Adv A N] (context a). When the adverb modifies predicative adjectives in other syntactic positions, the inflected forms are non-systematic and statistically random (context b). To account for this pattern, we propose that the adverbs demasiado/ poco, which diachronically originate from adjectives, retain within their structure syntactically inactive phi-features in standard Spanish. These features can be manipulated by post-syntactic operations of exponent insertion, giving rise to the inflected forms in context (b). The pattern observed in context (a), however, derives from a process of reanalysis of the adverbs, by virtue of which the phi-features are activated and are subject to syntactic Agree.