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Share Paper 3818

Pronominal Structure and the Third-Person Gap in Spanish
Samuel Jambrović
164-173 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

In English, and in many other languages, only first-person and second-person pronouns can immediately precede a noun: we/you/*they linguists. In Spanish, the equivalent construction requires the definite article but otherwise exhibits the same third-person gap: nosotros/vosotros/ustedes/*ellos los lingüistas 'we/you (informal)/you/they the linguists'. Given the morphological similarity between ellos 'they' and los 'the', one might attribute the problem with *ellos los lingüistas to the pronoun and the definite article competing for the same syntactic position, such as D. However, the fact that *ellos lingüistas 'they linguists' is ungrammatical as well suggests that a deeper issue is a play. In this paper, I argue that third-person pronouns like ellos spell out multiple heads in the noun phrase, including n and Div, provided that these heads are structurally adjacent. Not only does this analysis capture the inability of third-person pronouns to take nominal complements (*ellos lingüistas), but it also predicts their intolerance of restrictive relative clauses (*solo ellos que tienen pasaporte 'only they who have a passport'), which enter the derivation below D and interrupt the chain of heads that are realized by these forms.

Published in

Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Shweta Akolkar, Amber Galvano, Akil Ismael, Kang Franco Liu, and Line Mikkelsen
Table of contents
Printed edition: $475.00