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Object drop in Spanish is not island-sensitive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2022

MATÍAS VERDECCHIA*
Affiliation:
IIF (SADAF-CONICET) & University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bulnes 642, C1176, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentinamnverdecchia@filo.uba.ar

Abstract

Campos (1986) argues that object drop in Spanish exhibits island effects. This claim has remained unchallenged up to today and is largely assumed in the literature. In this paper, I show that this characterization is not empirically correct: given a proper discourse context, null objects can easily appear within a syntactic island in Spanish. This observation constitutes a non-trivial problem for object drop analyses based on movement.

Type
Squib
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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