Recomplementation as a paratactic phenomenon: Evidence from Spanish and English

Abstract

We provide a variety of empirical arguments in favor of a paratactic account of recomplementation constructions, in which a left-dislocated element appears in between two complementizers. Contrary to integrated analyses assuming Complementizer Phrase (CP) recursion or Rizzi’s split periphery, we assume that the dislocated phrase is structurally independent from the embedded clause it precedes, which in turn is an elliptical sentence fragment. The juxtaposed fragmentary sentences are linked by the doubled complementizer, which serves to overtly flag a ‘restart’ in discourse. We show that this account makes a range of welcome predictions while sidestepping non-trivial problems that arise for integrated/cartographic analyses, which assume that dislocated XPs are in left-peripheral positions (such as Spec-TopicP) and that the doubled complementizer spells out Topic⁰. A further advantage of the approach is that it provides a handle on recomplementation constructions beyond the core cases involving left-dislocation, which reduce to a mere subcase of the general phenomenon of elliptical ‘restarts’ in discourse.

1. Introduction: the phenomenon of recomplementation

Languages such as present-day Spanish display embedded dislocations, including Clitic Left-dislocation (ClLD) with an optional additional complementizer (in boldface):

This recomplementation variety of dislocation, henceforth R-ClLD, is a feature of colloquial language (Demonte & Fernández-Soriano 2009; Villa-García 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019) and is also attested in spoken varieties of other languages, such as English (Radford 2013, 2018; Villa-García 2019):

The phenomenon of multiple-complementizer constructions illustrated in (1) and (2) has commanded much attention in the field in recent years and has emerged as a fruitful area of research for investigations into the left periphery (Escribano 1991; Campos 1992; Iatridou & Kroch 1992; Fontana 1993; Uriagereka 1995; Wanner 1998; Barbosa 2000; Poletto 2000; Martín-González 2002; Rodríguez-Ramalle 2003; Ledgeway 2005; McCloskey 2006; Paoli 2006; Vincent 2006, 2019; Cocchi & Poletto 2007; Mascarenhas 2007; Demonte & Fernández-Soriano 2009, 2014; Fernández-Rubiera 2009; Etxepare 2010; González i Planas 2010, 2014; Villa-García 2010, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019; Haegeman 2012; Kempchinsky 2013; Gupton 2014; Salvesen 2014; Frank 2016, 2020; Munaro 2016; Martínez Vera 2017, 2019; Salvasen & Walken 2017; Cerrudo Aguilar & Gallego 2018; Echeverría 2021, 2022).

Although previous research has revealed many empirical properties of the construction (such as its iterative character, the inability of focal phrases to be flanked by complementizers, the possibility of multiple dislocates appearing between complementizers, and the island-inducing effect of the secondary complementizer), many questions surrounding the syntactic behavior of such constructions remain open and will be taken up here. Most extant analyses are framed within a cartographic or CP-recursion-based approach to the left periphery. Departing from such monosentential accounts, we argue that the issues raised by prior analyses can be circumvented on the assumption that recomplementation actually instantiates a discursive arrangement of two juxtaposed root clauses, which stand in a paratactic rather than hypotactic configuration. The analysis thus furthers our understanding of left-dislocation constructions more generally.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we provide a brief overview of previous (monosentential/cartographic) accounts; we then move on, in Section 3, to present our paratactic account of recomplementation and its consequences. Finally, Section 4 offers some concluding remarks.

2. Previous accounts

Accounts of recomplementation patterns in the generative tradition so far have assumed a multiclausal monosentential structure, where both complementizers and the sandwiched dislocate XP (… que/that XP que/that …) are bona fide constituents of an embedded clause. There are various versions of this general approach on the market, illustrated below for (1a): CP recursion (3a); Rizzian split CP and a TopicP position (3b); and Uriagereka’s (1995) FP projection (3c) (see Villa-García 2015):

A number of analyses of R-ClLD draw on Rizzi’s cartographic approach, varying mainly with respect to the left-peripheral head assumed to be occupied by the second complementizer. For instance, for López (2009), the first complementizer sits in Force⁰, while the second one occupies Finiteness⁰. Martín-González (2002) makes a proposal that departs slightly from the traditional Rizzian approach, in that the first complementizer also occupies Force⁰, whereas the second one heads a (Doubled)ForceP situated below TopicP in Rizzi’s periphery (i.e., ForceP > TopicP > (Doubled)ForceP > FocusP …); the sandwiched dislocate is in Spec-TopicP under this account. According to Rodríguez-Ramalle (2003), Villa-García (2012), and Martínez Vera (2019), the second complementizer occupies the head of TopicP, whose specifier hosts the dislocated XP, as shown in (3b). For reasons of space, we will not review each proposal separately here; the reader is referred to Villa-García (2015: Ch. 2) for a critical review of existing accounts.

The difference between the accounts in (3) is mostly terminological (a matter of labels); they are summarized by the abstract tree in (4):

Empirically, an analysis that assumes this kind of complex CP structure has several advantages. For the sake of illustration, we will concentrate on the TopicP account shown schematically in (3b). First, this analysis provides an elegant account of why phrases that can be left-dislocated can occupy the pre-secondary-complementizer position, but not foci, which do not undergo ClLD:

If focal phrases like A NADIE in (5) occupy FocusP, then it follows from the peripheral template that they will not be able to occur before the secondary instance of que, which occupies Topic⁰ (i.e., ForceP > TopicP > FocusP > FinitenessP …).

Moreover, the possibility of multiple ques after each dislocated phrase (Escribano 1991; Rodríguez-Ramalle 2003; Villa-García 2010, 2012, 2015; Radford 2018) is straightforwardly accommodated once TopicP is assumed to be recursive, as argued independently by Rizzi (1997), among many others (though see Benincà & Poletto 2004 for counterarguments):

English also allows for such iterative complementation:

Adopting the structure in (3b), Spanish (6) would be analyzed thus:

Despite their appeal, however, integrated/monosentential analyses of R-ClLD configurations such as those in (3) face major challenges. We will briefly outline these challenges below; they will be revisited and discussed more thoroughly in the course of the discussion of our paratactic-bisentential analysis in the following section:

1. (i) intonation;

2. (ii) connectivity (in relation to case/theta-roles and binding) and anticonnectivity (including lack of Condition B effects and seemingly doubled subjects);

3. (iii) opacity for extraction (i.e., islandhood);

4. (iv) dependence on first/high complementizer;

5. (v) non-distinctness of complementizers;

6. (vi) selectional restrictions.

As the examples provided so far show, a comma typically appears before the secondary complementizer (i). This comma is not arbitrary, but an orthographic rendition of the fact that the dislocated XP and the secondary complementizer are separated by a salient intonational boundary, typically represented by a pause before the second complementizer, which tends to be indicated in writing by means of a comma before que/that in the examples (Villa-García 2012, 2015, 2019; Frank 2016, 2020; Radford 2018; Martínez Vera 2019). On an integrated, multiclausal-monosentential account, it is not obvious how to derive the presence of this intonational break without stipulation, in particular under those accounts that assume that the dislocate and the second complementizer occupy the specifier and head of the same projection, respectively (Kempchinsky 2013; Radford 2018):

As far as connectivity and anticonnectivity (ii) are concerned, dislocates in R-ClLD exhibit properties that seemingly diagnose movement and base-generation simultaneously (a paradox first noted for ClLD generally in Cinque 1990). Regarding the former, contra the judgments reported in Villa-García (2012), local anaphors contained in a dislocate can be bound by an element occurring after the secondary complementizer:

Villa-García (2012, 2015) has argued that the dislocate in R-ClLD is base-generated in the sandwiched position in between complementizers, since the secondary complementizer blocks extraction from the lower clause (iii). However, data such as (10) challenge this conclusion, suggesting that reconstruction of the dislocate is not systematically absent. ² In addition, note that the dislocate is case-marked, as shown in (1a), repeated here for convenience:

If the dislocate is directly merged in the specifier of a left-peripheral projection headed by the second complementizer, then how the dislocate receives its case and theta-role is mysterious under standard assumptions, since the relevant case/theta assigner is lower in the structure and does not c-command the dislocate at any point in the derivation. ³

At the same time, invoking movement of the XP to a left-peripheral specifier is at variance with the non-movement properties of R-ClLD and ClLD in general (see Ott 2014, 2015 for detailed discussion); furthermore, it is unclear why such movement could not feed further, successive-cyclic movement to the higher clause. We turn to these properties of R-ClLD directly.

Regarding anticonnectivity (non-movement properties), two major issues arise for traditional monosentential analyses of R-ClLD. First of all, the dislocated phrase flanked by complementizers co-occurs with a coreferring lower pronominal/clitic correlate (i.e., a tu madre _k ‘your mother’ – la _k ‘her’ in (1a)/(11) above). On a monosentential analysis, it remains unclear why this configuration does not incur a Condition B violation (at least where the correlate is not further embedded). Put differently, no Condition B effect arises that would be expected if the dislocate locally c-commanded its pronominal correlate, as shown below for (1a)/(11):

Similarly, as illustrated in (13), R-ClLD can seemingly lead to doubling of the subject, which is generally impossible in null-subject languages such as Spanish (Barbosa 2009), but common in non-null-subject languages like English (cf. Mary _k , she _k is cool):

(spontaneous speech, Asturias, Spain, reported in Villa-García 2019)

Monoclausal analyses like (14) are forced to tolerate doubled subjects in such cases. Note that Condition B is again not violated, as we already saw above for cases such as (11).

The above problems are special cases of the general problems posed by ClLD for monosentential analyses, viz. the simultaneous occurrence of a dislocated XP and a pronominal correlate in what is hypothesized to be a single, integrated structure. Overall, the fact that the dislocate displays connectivity and anticonnectivity simultaneously yields a paradox that monosentential analyses are unfit to resolve (Ott 2014, 2015).

We now turn to problems posed specifically by the recomplementation variety of ClLD. Regular ClLD (without recomplementation) generally permits extraction across the dislocate into the main clause (Uribe-Extebarria 1991; Rizzi 2004; Ott 2015); by contrast, R-ClLD does not:

The empirical discovery that the secondary complementizer of recomplementation patterns blocks extraction (iii; Villa-García 2010, 2012, 2015), as indicated by (15b), has spawned much research in the last decade (Villa-García 2010, 2012, 2015, 2019; González i Planas 2014; MacDonald 2015; Cerrudo Aguilar & Gallego 2018; Radford 2018; Martínez Vera 2017, 2019; Petersen O’Farrill 2021; Torrego, in prep.). On monosentential analyses, it is unclear at best why doubling of the complementizer should have this effect, as is evident as soon as one considers the wide variety of proposals to account for it. As Villa-García (2019: 18) observes,

[t]he actual implementation of the locality issue remains a point of contention in the literature, with accounts that range from Comp-t effect violations, barrier/island violations, and CED (Constraint on Extraction Domains) violations to issues arising in relation to phase theory, antilocality, and the labeling algorithm. ⁴

In any case, under a recursive-CP or TopicP-based account, for instance, the assumption that the lexicalization of C⁰/Topic⁰ creates a locality violation that is suspended in its absence is necessarily stipulative (though see Villa-García 2012 for an analysis of this kind). For this reason, the island-creating effect of secondary complementizers has eluded principled analysis.

As a further problem for monosentential accounts of R-ClLD, Demonte & Fernández-Soriano (2014) point out that the secondary complementizer is contingent on the first one (iv), i.e., it can only appear when the preceding clause contains a complementizer as well: ⁵

This criticism is rooted in the fact that if the secondary que is a topic-marker lexicalizing the head of TopicP, then it is unclear why it would depend on the lexicalization of a higher left-peripheral head (Force⁰, by hypothesis). Demonte & Fernández-Soriano solve this issue by appealing to Martín-González’s (2002) (Doubled)ForceP (i.e., ForceP > TopicP > (Doubled)ForceP > FocusP…), but independent motivation for the existence of such a projection is not easy to come by, and thus the analysis remains stipulative. The issue is aggravated by the fact that TopicP, responsible for hosting the dislocate, hierarchically separates the postulated ForcePs. ⁶

Furthermore, as observed by João Costa (pers. comm. 2019), R-ClLD cross-linguistically employs form-identical complementizers (e.g., que – que; that – that) (v; see Section 3.7 for further evidence). This is mysterious under monosentential analyses, where each occurrence of the complementizer occurs in a different left-peripheral head (e.g., Force⁰ for que ₁ and Topic⁰ for que ₂). Note in addition that if que ₂ is a bona fide exponent of a Top(ic) head, as held by proponents of the TopicP account (Rodríguez-Ramalle 2003; Villa-García 2012), we would naturally expect a distinct morphological realization (rather than a default complementizer). ⁷ The verbatim repetition of the complementizer in R-ClLD is thus unaccounted for under monosentential analyses, barring additional stipulations.

Finally, Demonte & Fernández-Soriano (2009: 47) observe that R-ClLD cannot be embedded under factive verbs (vi):

As indicated, regular ClLD is possible in these cases, but R-ClLD is infelicitous. How can this state of affairs be accounted for on monosentential analyses? Again, the answer is not evident: for example, on a TopicP account, the difference between R-ClLD vs. regular ClLD reduces to the lexicalization of Topic⁰ (or C⁰, under CP-recursion). Thus, to account for the incompatibility of certain predicates such as factives and R-ClLD complements, one would have to assume that the higher predicate conditions the (non)lexicalization of a lower, structurally remote complementizer:

One could, of course, assume a different, more limited left-peripheral structure for factives (in the spirit of de Cuba & MacDonald 2013), but we would still need to account for why regular ClLD is legitimate in the same environment.

Overall, then, a number of non-trivial problems call into question traditional multiclausal-monosentential approaches to recomplementation patterns, despite their initial appeal. In what follows, we develop a proposal that radically deviates from standard assumptions about ClLD and R-ClLD, building on the idea that both configurations involve multiple root clauses in a paratactic configuration, albeit in different ways. As we show, the proposal not only solves the issues raised above but also makes additional welcome predictions.

3. A paratactic analysis

The proposal advocated here draws on work by Ott (2014, 2015, 2017), who argues that left-dislocated XPs are remnants of elliptical sentences (i.e., fragments) that are juxtaposed to their host sentences in discourse. ⁸ That is to say, dislocated XPs are not intra-sentential constituents moving to or base-generated in a left-peripheral position (e.g., TopicP); instead, they are bona fide extra-sentential constituents. The analysis is illustrated below for (19a):

The dislocate in CP1 and its host CP2, each a root clause, are thus paratactically ordered but endophorically related by ellipsis and cross-sentential anaphora. Ott shows that this approach can resolve the paradox initially discovered by Cinque (1990), i.e., the concurrent movement and non-movement (connectivity/anticonnectivity) properties of left-dislocation constructions.

One major advantage of this approach is that the obligatory co-occurrence of the clitic in CILD is no longer mysterious: the clitic is a pronoun in CP2 that anaphorically resumes the XP ese coche in the first clause (CP1), as would be the case across independently generated sentences:

The presence of the clitic in (R-)ClLD (and of a correlate more generally in left-dislocation) is thus a result of the fact that the clause containing it is indeed an entire sentence, which consequently must be syntactically complete. The following contrast in English (from Villa-García 2019) highlights this point:

The dislocation in (21a) permits recomplementation since the second, structurally autonomous clause is syntactically complete, unlike in the fronting case (21b), where recomplementation forces a parse of the second clause as an independent, and consequently syntactically incomplete, root-clause fragment. ⁹

In the same vein, the paratactic analysis explains why left-dislocated XPs are typically intonationally separated from their hosts (because they are independent, elliptical root clauses), precede entire V2 configurations in languages like German, and can mismatch their correlates in phi-features in a precisely delimited range of cases; see Ott (2014, 2015, 2017) for detailed discussion and references.

Ott (2015) touches on embedded ClLD, exemplified in (22a), and adumbrates an analysis which assumes interpolation or intercalation of a parenthetical fragment, as in (22b) (cf. Ott 2016; see Onea & Ott 2022 on linear interpolation of fragments):

Building on Ott’s analysis of matrix and embedded ClLD, we propose to analyze R-ClLD cases as paratactic configurations, but involving a somewhat different arrangement compared to regular ClLD on Ott’s approach.

In order to illustrate the proposal, let us focus again on (1a), repeated here for convenience:

Unlike in the case of regular ClLDs just discussed, our claim is that R-ClLD instantiates a sequence CP1 ≺ CP2 of two elliptical root clauses, such that CP1 realizes an embedded fragment, while CP2 constitutes a ‘restart’ spelling out a parallel embedded clause in full but leaving the redundant main clause unpronounced:

This paratactic analysis captures rather directly the intuitive character of recomplementation as a bona fide ‘repetition’ or ‘reduplication’ (see, e.g., Vincent, Bentley & Samu 2004; Ledgeway 2005; Kemchinsky 2013; Villa-García 2012, 2015, 2019).

The juxtaposed root clauses CP1 and CP2 in (24) are syntactically parallel, modulo the difference between the dislocated XP in CP1 and its clitic correlate in CP2. In this sense, again, coreference between the two is ensured by text/discourse coherence, analogous to sequences of non-elliptical sentences (see Ott 2017; Onea & Ott 2022):

On this view, recomplementation as in (24) is thus a mere surface variant of the sequence of sentences in (25). ¹⁰

It is important to note that the type of ellipsis assumed in (24) is independently available in Spanish (and other languages). CP1 instantiates an embedded fragment analogous to B’s response in (26):

Such embedded fragments must involve abstract structure and deletion (see Merchant 2004; Temmerman 2013), as a María is case-marked and the complementizer que is not a case assigner (i.e., there must be an underlying transitive verb in (26B)). We return to this type of fragment when discussing the issue of selection in R-ClLD (Section 3.8). ¹¹

The second sentence in the recomplementation sequence (i.e., … [_CP2 dice [que la invitaron]] in the above example) involves Phonetic Form (PF) deletion of the material above the complementizer, including the subject (if present) and the verb, leaving only the lower, embedded clause as a remnant. This type of ellipsis, too, is generally available, as evidenced by clausal fragment responses (see (30) below and Merchant 2004 for discussion).

Ellipsis resolution in CP1 can only occur once the postcedent (CP2) has been uttered, as is generally the case in ‘backward’ ellipsis:

Note that for the embedded clause in CP2 to be a licit fragment, it must contain an instance of (possibly broad) focus, in the way remnants of ellipsis are generally distinguished from the informational background. A corollary of this basic requirement is that the XP sandwiched between complementizers in R-ClLD cannot be itself focal—if it were, the remainder of the embedded clause would invariably be backgrounded, undermining its ability to function as a ‘restart’ fragment. In this way, the ellipsis-based analysis derives the fact that sandwiched XPs in R-ClLD will be contrastive topics or independent interjections (see below), but never foci. ¹²

Ellipsis in both clauses is certainly favored, though not in any grammatical sense obligatory: non-elliptical counterparts are naturally overly redundant but not unacceptable (see also (25) above):

Importantly, however, in cases involving quotative complementizers à la Etxepare (2010) (see, e.g., (16b) above) and lacking an (overt) embedding predicate in CP1, if the material preceding the second instance of the complementizer does not undergo ellipsis in CP2, the resulting sentence improves significantly vis-à-vis (28): ¹³

Lastly, one might wonder why the second que survives ellipsis in R-ClLD. Our claim is that this que serves to mark the ‘restart’ in discourse (see Section 3.6); its PF realization indicates that the point of restart is the embedded domain. A parallel situation can be found in clausal fragments, which require the presence of the complementizer que, as shown by (30).

After all, a that-type complementizer is the hallmark of a finite embedded clause, the simplest way of signaling the presence of a clause (i.e., … [_CP2 dice [ que …]]). In fact, as shown below in Section 3.7, complementizers other than the default declarative complementizer que/ that can appear in R-ClLD, which is fully consistent with our claim that reduplicative complementizers are overt manifestations of a ‘restart’ in discourse.

Overall, we conclude that there is nothing special about the types of ellipsis instantiated in (24): the composition of R-ClLD draws entirely on familiar and independently attested forms of phonological reduction. We take this to be an advantage over a recent proposal by Echeverría (2022), which, while similar in spirit, relies on multiple syntactic planes within a unitary representation to implement the intuition of R-ClLD as a restart (Villa-García 2019). Since Echeverría’s proposal remains rather vague on the formal mechanisms involved, we merely note here that our proposal relieves the grammar of the burden of generating multidominance structures.

In the next subsections, we turn to a variety of empirical arguments in favor of a bisentential, paratactic account of R-ClLD configurations.

3.1. Argument 1: Intonation

The dislocated XP and secondary que are typically separated by a salient intonational boundary, represented by a comma in orthography, as shown again in (31) (Villa-García 2012, 2015, 2019; Radford 2018; Martínez Vera 2019):

This is wholly compatible with our claim that the relation between fragment and host is paratactic, each sentence forming a separate intonational phrase (cf. Nespor & Vogel 1986 and Dehé 2007 on parentheticals and intonational phrasing):

Fragment and host thus exhibit ‘comma intonation’ (intonational isolation/separation), exactly as expected if the sequence is composed of linearly juxtaposed root clauses in a paratactic rather than hypotactic arrangement.

3.2. Argument 2: connectivity and anticonnectivity

As we saw above, the dislocated XP displays a range of connectivity effects, showing that it cannot be base-generated in its surface position sandwiched between the two complementizers (as claimed by some integrated, monosentential accounts such as Villa-García’s 2012 TopicP analysis shown in (3b)).

By contrast, on the paratactic approach advocated here, these properties follow directly from the fact that ellipsis in CP1 is licensed under identity with CP2, so that the dislocate and the clitic share theta/case-properties (see Ott 2015 and Merchant 2001, 2004 on ellipsis-mediated connectivity more generally). In an example such as (1a), a tu madre receives case and a theta-role from the elided verb invitaron in CP1 in a run-of-the-mill fashion; analogously, the accusative clitic la in CP2 receives its case and theta-role from overt invitaron in CP2:

Apparent reconstruction effects for Condition A are likewise mediated by elided parallel sentential structure, as expected under our analysis; in the example below, the anaphor is locally bound inside CP1 by al duque, as shown in (34b).

At the same time, the paratactic approach handles anticonnectivity effects which reveal that the dislocated XP is syntactically disjoint from the following clause headed by the doubled complementizer. Coreference between the dislocate and the pronominal correlate, on this approach, is an instance of cross-sentential anaphora, analogous to the following:

Therefore, the dislocated element sandwiched between complementizers and its correlate are never in a (symmetric or asymmetric) c-command relation at any stage of the derivation; the dislocate is simply not a constituent of the host clause/CP2, which accounts for why the simultaneous presence of dislocate and correlate does not give rise to a Condition B violation.

Furthermore, the apparent doubling of a preverbal subject in cases such as (13) above dissolves on the analysis pursued here, as dislocate and correlate are in separate sentences: the double can appear simply because CP2 is a syntactically complete sentence in its own right:

In sum, the connectivity and anticonnectivity effects found in R-ClLD constructions are accommodated straightforwardly by our approach, while posing an irresolvable paradox for integrated, multiclausal-monosentential analyses (as expounded in Section 2).

3.3. Argument 3: Non-clitic correlates

On the paratactic approach advocated here, recomplementation is a bona fide restart in discourse. Accordingly, we expect this restart to formally manifest itself in various ways beyond the ‘classical’ R-ClLD pattern, where some topical XP is resumed by a clitic correlate. As we will see presently, this expectation is borne out.

In addition to pronominal clitics, R-ClLD readily permits epithetic correlates:

(Note that no pause occurs between the epithetic correlate and the rest of the sentence). The ability of epithetic correlates to occur in CP2 is not surprising under a paratactic approach to R-ClLD, where the dislocate and its correlate belong to separate root clauses and are anaphorically related cross-sententially:

This is exactly as in an analogous sequence of non-elliptical sentences:

In contrast, traditional multiclausal-monosentential analyses including the TopicP account are at odds with data such as those in (37): one and the same predicate is required to assign identical cases (and theta-roles) to two separate elements. The problem does not vanish on the assumption that the dislocated phrase is externally merged in between ques (Villa-García 2012), since there would still be only one single predicate (i.e., dan ‘give’ in (37a)) in the overall structure:

This non-trivial issue does not arise under the paratactic approach espoused here, as seen in (38). Epithetic correlates, in short, are a natural by-product of our paratactic analysis of recomplementation. ¹⁴

Non-clitic correlates are furthermore found when the XP sandwiched between complementizers is non-topical/non-referential, as is the case with quantifiers which do not undergo regular ClLD, since they cannot be resumed cross-sententially by clitics (Ott 2015); in this case, the quantifier itself is repeated verbatim in CP2:

Note that in both cases the phrase is repeated in the embedded clause because the fragmentary clause must be syntactically complete; at the same time, no such function could be performed by a clitic (or epithetic) correlate.

Examples such as the above (as well as others to be discussed in Section 3.6 below) militate decisively against analyses of recomplementation that derive its occurrence directly from the activation of some dedicated topic position; they point instead to the conclusion that recomplementation is a phenomenon that occurs independently of ClLD, exactly as expected on our approach.

3.4. Argument 4: Clausal negation

A further argument for our paratactic approach derives from recomplementation patterns involving dislocated negatively quantified phrases. In the presence of such a negative dislocate, the host clause must obligatorily contain a negation (Martín-González 2002; Villa-García 2012, 2015): ¹⁵

On a monosentential analysis, the obligatory appearance of negation no ‘not’ in (42) is puzzling and requires elaborate auxiliary assumptions. To illustrate, Villa-García (2015: 149–157) rationalizes the mandatory presence of negation in (42a) as follows: since the dislocate a ninguno de ellos ‘none of them’ is base generated where it surfaces (that is, in the position between complementizers), it never transits through Spec-NegP on its way to the left periphery (that is, to Spec-TopicP); since no spec-head relation is ever established between the dislocated negative quantifier and Neg⁰, the head no needs to be inserted as a last resort in Neg⁰, following the logic of Bošković (2001). The reason is that Bošković treats negation as an affix that requires an n-phrase to be PF-adjacent to it at some point in the derivation. Since a base-generated dislocate in the sandwiched position is never PF-adjacent to Neg⁰, inserting no is necessary to circumvent a violation that would ensue if the negative affix were left stranded.

On our paratactic analysis, by contrast, the mandatory presence of negation naturally follows from the fact that the host clause must have the same polarity as the elliptical clause to satisfy ellipsis parallelism. The dislocated negative XP surviving ellipsis in CP1 does not negate CP2: no ‘not’ is thus required in CP2 for CP1 and CP2 to be semantically parallel, as shown schematically in (43).

In other words, the otherwise puzzling interaction of R-ClLD and negation in these cases emerges as a direct consequence of the ‘restart’ nature of the construction, implemented here as a paratactic sequence of elliptical root clauses. ¹⁶ The behavior of negation in a parallel sequence of non-elliptical sentences is exactly analogous, as expected:

We turn next to the by-now longstanding issue of the impossibility of extraction across secondary complementizers.

3.5. Argument 5: An extraction asymmetry

As illustrated in (15) above, unlike regular ClLD, R-ClLD prohibits extraction from the clause following the dislocate. On our terms, this follows from the structural disjointedness of the sentences involved, each a separately generated root clause. For purposes of illustration, compare the paratactic configurations in regular ClLD according to Ott (2015), in (45), and R-ClLD, in (46), on our approach:

ClLD in (45) permits extraction from the lower clause into the main clause because the former is structurally subordinate to the latter (hypotaxis); the dislocate a tu novia is a separate fragmentary expression interpolated in production.

By contrast, the attempted extraction in the R-ClLD case is cross-sentential (46) due to the paratactic nature of the configuration (CP1 and CP2 are separately generated expressions), hence ruled out on principled and general grounds as illicit extraction across sentences. Recall that no such explanation is available on monosentential analyses, which treat ClLD and R-ClLD as phonological variants and consequently struggle to account for asymmetries of this kind.

Note that our explanation building on the structural disconnect of CP1 and CP2 is not undermined by apparent cross-sentential binding, as in the following:

The binding dependency here is computed internally to the elliptical CP2, which, due to general parallelism requirements, contains a silent instance of the binder:

An anonymous reviewer wonders why the ungrammatical extraction in (15b) could not alternatively be derived as involving a wh-dependency in each of the juxtaposed sentences CP1 and CP2:

This would indeed be a plausible alternative if the required elliptical CP1 were independently licensed. But embedded fragments with concomitant wh-extraction appear to be illicit quite generally, and regardless of context:

(Compare English *What did you tell me that to your girlfriend? in the same context). The rather tight restrictions on embedded fragments are generally not well understood; see Temmerman (2013) for some preliminary observations. Whatever rules out fragmentary expressions such as (50), they are plainly not available as building blocks for R-ClLD configurations, ruling out the alternative suggested by the reviewer.

Overall, the extraction asymmetry observed above furnishes a strong argument in favor of the differential analysis of regular ClLD and R-ClLD advocated here: while the former involves bona fide subordination/hypotaxis (plus linear interpolation of the fragment dislocate), the latter instantiates a genuine restart in which no syntactic connection exists between the first sentence containing the embedded dislocate (CP1) and the second sentence introduced by the secondary complementizer (CP2).

3.6. Argument 6: Interdependence of complementizers

Villa-García (2019) contends that one of the functions of the additional occurrence of que is that of a discourse marker; in a similar vein, Casasanto & Sag (2008) argue that doubled complementizers aid processing. This general notion meshes well with our approach to R-ClLD, where the dislocated XP is syntactically disjoint from the subsequent clause, and as such a separate unit of discourse. While we cannot fully develop this idea within the confines of the present paper, we suggest that the discourse/processing-related function of the secondary complementizer in R-ClLD is to overtly signal a restart by identifying the following material as an embedded clause and thus necessarily a subsentential fragment. This is wholly consistent with our analysis, where the dislocate is part of the initial clause, and the two sentences involved in R-ClLD are cataphorically linked by ellipsis under identity.

R-ClLD is not the only case where a that-like element takes on this function. Clausal fragment responses generally require a complementizer, even when it can be omitted in the non-elliptical source sentence (see Merchant 2004 for discussion and sources, and (30) above for Spanish data):

As in the case of R-ClLD, the complementizer forces a parse of the clause as a subsentential fragment rather than a non-elliptical root clause, anaphorically anchoring it in the immediate linguistic context.

Recall from the discussion in Section 2 that the question of why the second que is contingent on the first one (i.e., the occurrence of second que depends on the occurrence of a higher que) is an unresolved issue on monosentential accounts. By contrast, the paratactic analysis advocated here offers a straightforward rationalization of this otherwise puzzling dependence: occurrence of the second que is contingent on that of the first simply because a ‘restart’ of an embedded clause is possible only where there is one to begin with.

What is more, the second complementizer can co-occur with an unambiguous discourse marker such as pues ‘then/thus,’ as in (53). Note that discourse-related particles tend to cluster together in many languages (Hansen 1998). ¹⁷

In fact, the paratactic approach naturally extends to instances of restarts in the absence of a dislocate, where instead a mere pause (54a) or some interjection (54b,c,d) separates the two fragmentary sentences (Villa-García 2015, 2019), as is widely attested in spontaneous speech (recall also the facts in (41) in Section 3.3):

Echeverría (2021, 2022: 10n4), who pursues an analysis of recomplementation in terms of multiple nonlinear planes, claims that the absence of a dislocate in such cases poses a problem for the paratactic analysis pursued here. On the contrary, we submit that this approach offers precisely the leeway required to accommodate such restarts more generally, permitting reflective pauses, interjections and the like to be intercalated in between both sentences:

As previously noted in Section 3.3, cases such as those in (54) show that recomplementation is not a corollary of ClLD but a more general production phenomenon. ¹⁸ It would therefore be inaccurate to model the observed complementizer doubling as a direct effect of dislocation, however this intuition is implemented.

3.7. Argument 7: Form-identity of complementizers

On the paratactic analysis, the fact that the doubled complementizer is form-identical to the first one is a straightforward corollary of the parallelism required of the sentences involved for purposes of ellipsis resolution:

By the same token, the paratactic approach to recomplementation can easily accommodate cases of multiple reduplicative complementizers (i.e., que/that XP, que/that XP, que/that …), as illustrated in (6) in Section 2. Recall that such iterative cases are analyzed on the TopicP account as cases of TopicP recursion (cf. (8)), argued for on independent grounds by Rizzi (1997). On the paratactic account, these are simply cases of sequential elliptical sentences, as shown in (57); nothing else needs to be said.

As a further argument, consider reduplicated interrogative complementizers in both Spanish and English (Villa-García 2015, 2019): ¹⁹

This naturally follows from the paratactic analysis, whereby the repeated interrogative complementizer is selected by the predicate preguntar ‘ask’/wonder in CP2:

Further support for this line of reasoning derives from Plann’s (1982) discovery of a contrast in Spanish embedded questions under verbs that do not inherently take an interrogative clausal complement. As shown by the translations of the minimal pair in (60), the presence of que turns the embedded clause into a reported interrogative (i.e., an indirect question) (see RAE-ASALE 2009 for further discussion and examples):

With recomplementation, however, the presence of a second occurrence of the que-si sequence becomes obligatory (Villa-García 2015: Ch. 5): ²⁰

For monosentential analyses which assume a complex left periphery, accounting for this contrast is not straightforward: if, for instance, the interrogative complementizer heads Int(errogative)P (as in Rizzi’s 2001 analysis), the only possibility to analyze (61) would be to invoke (discontinuous) recursion of IntP:

On this type of analysis, the high que would by hypothesis be the realization of Force⁰ and the second one the realization of Topic⁰. As noted, two occurrences of IntP would have to be postulated, one above and one below TopicP. Note that if we were to dispense with TopicP and locate the dislocate in the specifier of the lower IntP, this would in effect deprive us of the head position for secondary que, yielding the wrong result:

All in all, the above considerations strongly suggest that an account of this kind is untenable.

On our approach, on the other hand, the repetition of the que-si sequence in cases like (61) is predicted, simply because CP2 is an elliptical restart of the embedded indirect question:

Having only si without que would violate parallelism between CP1 and CP2, as it would not allow the surface remnant of CP2 to be interpreted as a reported question. Overall, the facts reviewed above provide further support for the paratactic account of recomplementation patterns advocated here.

It is worth stressing again that our reasoning vindicates the intuition behind the label re-complementation originally given by Higgins (1988): the second que heralds the presence of a duplicated complement clause. Recomplementation truly is recomplementation.

3.8. Argument 8: Selection

As noted in Section 2 in relation to the data in (17), only certain predicates allow for R-ClLD in their complement domain. More specifically, in Spanish, factives such as lamentar ‘lament’ cannot take recomplementized clausal complements, as noted by Demonte & Fernández-Soriano (2009), Villa-García (2012, 2015), and González i Planas (2014). In principle, this is handled straightforwardly by the paratactic approach, given that the kind of embedded fragments argued here to feature in recomplementation is likewise restricted to verbs such as decir ‘to say,’ but unavailable with factive predicates such as lamentar ‘to lament:’

The same applies to other predicates, such as volitional querer ‘want,’ which are also incompatible with both recomplementation (66) and embedded fragments (67), much like factives.

Although the issue of selection should be further investigated in more detail in future work, the above observation adds to the repertoire of arguments in favor of a paratactic account of recomplementation.

3.9. Argument 9: No recomplementation with ClRD

Demonte & Fernández-Soriano (2009) observe that embedded Clitic Right-dislocation (ClRD) cannot be accompanied by a doubled complementizer:

Under a TopicP-based account of ClRD, this is unexpected: everything else being equal, if a doubled que is the realization of Topic⁰, this topic marker ought to be licensed for right-peripheral topics as much as for left-peripheral ones.

Can the paratactic approach deal with this asymmetry between ClLD and ClRD? The answer to this question turns out to be positive. ²¹ Building on the bisentential analysis of right-dislocation proposed in Ott & De Vries (2016) (see also Fernández-Sánchez 2017 for Romance), the attempted R-ClRD in (68) is analyzed as shown in (69a) vis-à-vis a corresponding R-ClLD case on our terms (69b):

Note, first, that in (69a) there is an incongruence between the nominal cataphoric clitic in the first clause and the subsequent (illicit) fragment, identified as clausal by the complementizer; (68) thus violates the expectation of a nominal fragment based on the rhetorical connection between the sentences (Ott 2017; Onea & Ott 2022).

Furthermore, the kind of fragment that (68) attempts to employ is simply not licensed in general; we can see this by considering (70B), which is a direct equivalent of CP2 in (69a) on our analysis:

This contrasts markedly with the kind of sequence comprising a verb such as decir ‘say’ + que + XP that appears in R-ClLD (as in CP1 in (69b) above) and that is independently available as a fragment response:

The incompatibility of recomplementation and ClRD thus follows straightforwardly on the bisentential paratactic analysis.

4. Conclusion

We have shown in this paper that a version of the paratactic account proposed by Ott (2014, 2015) for regular ClLD adapted here to the recomplementation variety overcomes many of the problems raised for monosentential accounts of R-ClLD configurations (such as cartographic analyses adopting a Rizzian left periphery) and makes several welcome predictions.

The analysis has also helped unveil previously unnoticed properties of recomplementation, such as the fact that not only dislocated constituents, but also other kinds of intercalated expressions can occur in between the two complementizers. As we have argued, this is just what we expect if the secondary complementizer signals a ‘restart’ in discourse.

As noted by an anonymous reviewer, our analysis undermines the common idea (implicit, for instance, in the cartographic works referenced above) that Spanish and English differ in relevant respects regarding the composition of the left periphery; on our analysis, so-called recomplementation is the result of entirely general mechanisms. This is not to say that left-peripheral restarts will be uniform cross-linguistically; ellipsis options vary across languages, and this will affect the form of fragmentary expressions involved, among other factors. Needless to say, this paper merely scratches the surface of the phenomenon, and we hope that it can inspire deeper investigations into the interrelation of ellipsis and restarts across languages.

Overall, we have shown within the expressly narrow focus of this paper that a paratactic analysis of recomplementation for languages like Spanish and English not only directly implements Higgins’ (1988) original intuition about the phenomenon but also provides elegant and principled answers to a host of perennial questions that have proven difficult to resolve in a principled fashion on previous approaches.