SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS OF SPANISH PROPHRASES SI AND NO

Among the multiple analyses proposed for the Spanish yes / no words si and no, the models that consider them as prophrases seem to be the most adequate ones, since they allow capturing their syntactic and pragmatic properties. Nevertheless, little effort has been devoted to clarifying the nature of the phrase it can form. For doing so, this work compares prophrases with other syntactic units that can appear as utterances, such as fragments, verbal clauses and verbless clauses. The result of this contrast indicates that prophrases share some properties with these three types but they have distinct properties of their own and should, therefore, be included as a fourth kind of syntactic structure able to form a full utterance.