On resumptive prolepsis in Spanish

CARRANZA, FERNANDO; MUÑOZ PÉREZ, CARLOS; VERDECCHIA LEANDRO, MATÍAS NICOLÁS

New York

Workshop; ALFALito NYC; 2019

ALFAL

Spanish exhibits resumptive prolepsis, i.e., a construction in which a prepositional phrasePP seemingly selected by a matrix verb is semantically interpreted with respect to thepredicate in an embedded clause (e.g., yo pienso [PP de Eliana] que es buena persona).The construction requires that the embedded sentence contains an anaphoric (sometimesnull) element referring to the matrix PP (e.g., yo pienso [PP de Elianai] que sui hermanoes buena persona vs. *yo pienso [PP de Elianai] que Jorgej es buena persona).Similar phenomena in a number of languages have been analysed in different wayswithin the generative framework. Simplifying the list of theoretical alternatives, the Spanish variant can be taken to involve either (i) movement of the PP (or the DP within it)from the embedded clause, or (ii) base-generation of the PP. In the former type of analysis, the pronoun should be taken to indicate the position of the movement trace (e.g.,Pesetsky 1998); in the latter, the connection between the PP and its pronominal counterpart must be captured by appealing to non-transformational means, e.g., correference(Davies 2005), or predication (Landau 2011).Following Davies (2005), it is proposed that Spanish resumptive prolepsis involves abase-generated PP in the matrix clause. This approach is supported by a number of facts,e.g., the construction is insensitive to island restrictions (e.g., dijiste de Elianai que elhombre que proi conoci´o es un idiota), which makes the movement analysis untenable.The PP and the pronoun in the Spanish proleptic construction are assumed to beindirectly related through predication, as in Landau?s (2011) analysis of copy raising. Anull operator OP is taken to occupy the Spec,C position of the embedded sentence, bindthe pronoun, and turn the clause into a predicate whose subject is the nominal constituentwithin the PP. The operator OP is taken to induce island effects (e.g., *¿a qui´en piensasde Eliana que (ella) ama?).Salzmann (2017) proposes a refined version of this analysis based on reconstruction effects attested in German. According to him, the operator OP heads a DP projection whoseNP is identical to the NP within the PP; the NP complement of OP is deleted throughellipsis. Moreover, Salzmann further assumes that pronouns in prolepsis constructions areobtained through PF-deletion of the NP complements of D heads (Elbourne 2001). Under this analysis, anti-reconstruction effects are explained as instances of Vehicle Change(Fiengo & May 1994).Spanish, however, does not exhibit any reconstruction effect within the embeddedclause, i.e., the lexico-syntactic structure of the PP is available only at the matrix level.This is attested with respect to the very same domains that Salzmann uses to justifyhis analysis: idiom interpretation (e.g., *dije del pelo que me lo hab´ıan tomado), variablebinding (e.g., ellosj dicen de sus*i/j estudiantes que todosilos profesores los critican), andCondition A (e.g., ´elj piensa de la foto de s´ı mismo*i/j que Jorgeila detesta). Therefore,the Spanish data shows that the identity relation between the PP, the operator OP andthe pronoun that is captured by Salzmann?s analysis must be considered (at best) aparameter of variation rather than a primitive property of prolepsis