On the use of marked syntax in four short stories written by Hispanic American writers: a functional perspective

Abstract

We are going to analyse the main syntactical processes of thematization and postponement in English in four short stories written by four different Hispanic American writers who wrote around the seventies: Rudolfo Anaya's The Force of Luck, Denise Chávez's Evening in Paris, Alberto Álvaro Ríos' My Father and the Snow and Ana Castillo's My Mother's Mexico. The main purpose of this article is to show that presenting certain important facts in the short stories using several marked syntactical structures in English (extraposition, existential sentences, pseudo-cleft sentences, passive, cleft sentences) is not at random because those structures have specific communicative implications as we will see with the analysis of the corpus of examples. We will also prove that these Chicano writers create a social reality throughout the recurrent use of these processes or express deep feelings since the use of the anomalous syntactical processes under analysis points out a contrast with the normal SVO order of the English sentence.