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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 259–278

Person features and functional heads

Evidence from an exceptional optative sentence in Ibero-Romance

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This paper provides empirical support to the hypothesis that clause typing operators can bear person features and contribute to the sentence not only semantically but also syntactically. Assuming that optative sentences contain an EX operator that combines with a proposition and turns it into the expression of an emotion, I derive the general restriction banning wh-elements that introduce optative sentences from semantic factors. The exceptional grammaticality of certain wh-optatives headed by the wh-word who in Ibero-Romance (Sp. quién, Cat. qui, Gal. quen) requires an account crucially involving syntax in addition to semantics. I propose that the EX operator in optatives bears a person feature and, when in a sufficiently local configuration, binds the subject and enters into an agreement relation with it. The exceptional Ibero-Romance who-optatives are a consequence of this agreement relation.

Keywords: Catalan, exclamative, Force, Galician, Ibero-Romance, Optative, person, Spanish, type-clause, wh-words
Published online: 8 December 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.13san
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Sánchez López, Cristina
2018. Chapter 17. Romance evaluative que/che/să sentences as inverted optatives. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 14], ► pp. 293 ff. DOI logo
Sánchez López, Cristina
2021. Subjuntivo en oraciones independientes. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 137:2 ► pp. 383 ff. DOI logo

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