Dialectal variation in the expression of que in sí-que ‘yes that’ contexts across Spanish: the case of some Latin American Spanish varieties

This paper investigates dialectal microvariation across the Spanishspeaking world in terms of the presence/absence of que in sí-que contexts, whose function is to signal the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition. In this connection, we argue that the account recently proposed by Villa-García & González Rodríguez (in press) for polarity-encoding sí ‘yes’ on the one hand and for sí-que ‘yes that’ sequences in Iberian Spanish on the other readily extends to a number of Latin American varieties where que in sí que is syntactically present albeit unpronounced (i.e., sí Ø/que), although it can be overt as well. We provide a variety of LF- and PF-related arguments to this effect, and show that the dialectal split brought to light here is consonant with a view of (micro-)variation whereby PF spellout plays a key role (Barbiers 2009; Rizzi 2013; Rizzi & Bocci 2017; inter alia).