Experimental testing of the left periphery

This manuscript presents an empirical description of the left periphery based on the performance of speakers of Castilian Spanish in a corpus analysis, an acceptability judgment task, and a scripted production task. The picture drawn by the three studies look as follows: First, clitic-doubled left dislocations (CLLD) fulfil multiple discourse functions, but the construction is not completely free from discourse restrictions. Second, canonical utterances are also able to fulfil CLLD’s discourse functions. Third, CLLD does not present distinctive intonational patterns depending on the discourse function. Fourth, there is partial evidence that focus fronting (FF) presents an intonational pattern different than that of CLLD. The concluding section of the manuscript calls from a new model of the left periphery.