The Spanish system of Event Attentionworthiness. Word Order and Literary Structure.

Eduardo Ho-Fernández

University of Southern Maine 

September, 2024

Through the reading of Gabriel García Márquez’s La Mala Hora (using an English translation), this video presentation demonstrates how the clustering of grammatical meanings for one-participant events in Spanish (Ho-Fernández 2020) can be applied to structuring and interpreting a literary text (cf. Diver 1982). The presentation deals with Participant-Event word order formats, i.e., E P= and P= E, in which coreferentiality (designated by the = sign) figures as a component of the signal. It proposes a new communicative rationale for one-participant events, detailing the absence of signaling of attention on participants when a single participant is involved. The clustering of meaning around sub-themes within a text is offered as part of the solution to the distributional problem. The presentation also briefly compares the Spanish system of Event Attentionworthiness with similar grammatical systems in other languages.