Types of zero complements in French and Spanish prepositional phrases

New evidence from acceptability judgment experiments

Abstract

Some French prepositions can appear without an overt complement. The discussion about the status of such zero complements (starting with Zribi-Hertz's (1984a, 1984b) seminal work) is still ongoing. More recently, Authier (2016) argued that French prepositions are heterogeneous in this respect: The zero complement of only some prepositions is a null pronoun (e.g., avec 'with', but not pour 'for'). I aim to take this discussion one step further and scrutinize whether the zero complement of one and the same preposition can have different statuses. To this end I compare zero complements in two contexts: reduced sentences with a contrastive focus on the preposition vs. prepositions in full sentences without contrastive focus on the preposition. Based on data from acceptability judgment experiments, I will show that the zero complements in these two contexts underly different restrictions with respect to animacy and crosslinguistic distribution (comparing French and Spanish). This suggests two types of zero complements in the case of prepositions like avec: null pronouns in non-contrastive contexts, and background deletion in contrastive contexts. Additionally, the data provides novel insights about strong pronouns vs. zero complements in French and Spanish PPs, highlighting different animacy restrictions on zero complements and strong pronouns in the two languages.