Generic Null Objects in Spanish
doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.55.2.5
Keywords:
Animacy; generic null objects; genericity; pro; Spanish; variablesAbstract
This paper explores the grammatical constraints operating on Spanish generic null objects (e.g. Esta película sorprende Ø ‘this film surprises’), as well as their syntactic representation. Regarding their grammatical, it is claimed in this paper that generic null objects in Spanish do not obtain their interpretation from an antecedent (i.e., they are non-anaphoric), must occur in generic sentences, be affected by the event denoted by the verb and receive a human reading. Also, their occurrence is lexically constrained: they only occur with predicates that allow human objects. Regarding their syntactic properties, generic null objects are not only semantically interpreted, but also syntactically represented, since they are sensitive to syntactic operations such as control, binding and secondary predication. Specifically, generic null objects are syntactically a set of D and φ-features (i.e., they display D, gender and number features). Therefore, they are DPs. Regarding their analysis, it is proposed in this paper that generic null objects behave as variables bound by an operator in Spanish. This explains the different interpretations they receive depending on the operator in the sentence.
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