Passivization and pseudo-relatives with perception verbs in Spanish
Abstract
Perception verbs in Spanish (e.g. ver, ‘to see’; oír, ‘to hear’) can combine simultaneously with a direct object and different kinds of clausal modifiers. One of these are pseudo-relative clauses (e.g. que se caía, ‘that he fell’, in Ana vio a Juan que se caía, literally ‘Ana saw John that he fell’, with the meaning of ‘Ana saw John falling’). If the verb combines with a pseudo-relative, its passivization is no longer possible (*Juan fue visto que se caía, literally John was seen that he fell). In this paper, we contend that this pattern is due to an obviation effect. This explains not only the behavior of these verbs regarding passivization, but also the fact that reflexive and passive se with pseudo-relatives also leads to ungrammatical results. We conjecture that this obviation effect may be related to a defectiveness of the embedded complementizer. We draw a possible analysis for this behavior in terms of an anti-logophoric operator in the periphery of the pseudo-relative.
Keywords
embedding, perception verbs, obviation, SpanishReferences
We presented previous versions of this paper in the XVII Meeting of SAEL and in the workshop “Romance Languages: Recent Contributions to Linguistic Theory”. We are very thankful to the audience of those meetings and, especially to Roberta Pires de Oliveira and Cilene Rodrigues, who invited us to contribute to this dossier. We also express our gratitude to José Camacho and Andrés Saab for reading a draft, to Romina Trebisaccce, Matías Verdecchia and Andrea Bohrn for helping us with data and judgments and to Rocío Maure for helping us improve our writing. As usual, all errors and omissions are ours.
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