Extraposition from Subject in Germanic and Romance
- Autores: Marian Alves Castro
- Localización: Taking stock to look ahead: celebrating forty years of English studies in Spain / coord. por María Ferrández San Miguel, Claus Peter Neumann, 2018, ISBN 978-84-16723-51-5, págs. 167-176
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
-
Resumen
This paper examines, from a minimalist perspective, the availability of extraposition of relative clauses from DP subjects in Germanic and Romance languages. As a result of the application of this movement operation, in a sentence like A man came in yesterday that wanted to talk to you the DP subject appears scattered in two syntactic positions. The data presented in this paper will reveal that the availability of extraposition in Romance correlates with the linear position of the subject with respect to the verbal head. Thus, the operation yields acceptable results only when it targets a postverbal subject. The impossibility of extraposing from a preverbal subject comes to confirm the different status of this constituent in Germanic and Romance. It is its referential interpretation (and its topic status) that is responsible for the unacceptability of extraposition
