A Formal Approach to Spanish ‘Genitive’ Pronouns in Non-Nominal Domains

Abstract

This paper examines the distribution of ‘genitive’ pronouns in non-nominal domains in Spanish. These pronouns can alternate with constructions headed by the item de ‘of’ and a pronoun or other Determiner Phrases (DPs). In general Spanish, this alternation between a synthetic (nuestro ‘our’) and an analytic (de nosotros ‘of us’) option is found in the nominal domain. However, when looking at variation, this alternation appears in adverbial, verbal and adjectival domains too. We discuss this phenomenon from a neo-constructionist approach, which assumes the late insertion of phonological exponents. We propose that the analytic and the synthetic options have almost the same syntactic structure, the only difference being the nature of the nominalizer’s φ-features. When the nominalizer values its φ-features, it can be lexicalized alone and the ‘genitive’ pronoun lexicalizes the rest of the structure, including the introducer p/Place. Otherwise, when the nominalizer cannot (or needs not to) value its features, a ‘non-genitive’ pronoun lexicalizes the pronominal structure and the head p/Place is lexicalized by the item de. Our proposal explains the complementary distribution between agreement/nominal morphology and the item de observed in many Spanish constructions. Different consequences are advantageously deduced.