Towards a typology of focus: Subject position and microvariation at the discourse–syntax interface

•Preverbal subjects in constructions involving focus fronting are possible in some varieties of Spanish.•These preverbal subjects are interpreted as Given Topics, which move to Spec-TP.•Fronting operations connected with focus include Contrastive Focus and Mirative Focus, and Quantifier Fronting.•Resumptive Preposing is an instance of Aboutness-Shift Topic.

In this work I explore the different discourse–syntax interface properties of focus fronting in Standard Spanish (SS) and Southern Peninsular Spanish (SPS) including Andalusian and Extremaduran varieties. In SS it is taken for granted that in focus fronting the verb is obligatorily adjacent to the preposed constituent. I show that this is not the case in SPS, where this condition is optional. I carry out an analysis of three types of foci which involve movement to the left periphery (contrastive focus, mirative focus and quantifier fronting) and one type of topic (resumptive preposing). Discourse, syntactic, and semantic properties are taken into account to illustrate this typology. Crucially, only contrastive and mirative focus contexts allow for preverbal subjects in SPS, which are proposed to be Given Topics in this variety. On the other hand, resumptive preposing is shown to entail a case of topic fronting. I use different experiments with empirical data and judgements by native speakers to test my proposal that focus-verb (or topic-verb) adjacency is subject to microparametric variation in Spanish.