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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 95–110

External possession in Brazilian Portuguese

Null possessors as null anaphors

| University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz

External possession, a phenomenon where the DP interpreted as possessor is a syntactic dependent of the clause, appearing outside a possessive structure, is instantiated in a variety of ways cross-linguistically. A number of recent proposals have understood these constructions to involve A-movement operations. This paper presents evidence that a movement approach to external possession in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) makes incorrect predictions about its locality restrictions, including island effects and sensitivity to discourse factors. I provide an analysis in which the dependency between possessor and possessum is mediated by null anaphors, which are also shown to display logophoric behavior.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: the phenomenon and issues
  • 2.External possession in Brazilian Portuguese
    • 2.1Discourse antecedents
    • 2.2Lack of c-command
    • 2.3Intervention effects
    • 2.4Island effects: the view from relative clauses
  • 3.Null possessors as null anaphors: binding and logophoricity
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.07due
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