Phases, labeling, antilocality and intonational phrases: recomplementation in Spanish

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses recomplementation (i.e. double-complementizer constructions) in Spanish, comparing Latin American Spanish (LAS) and European Spanish (ES). I make the novel observation that in spite of a superficial difference whereby a lower que after a left dislocate (LD) surfaces in ES but not in LAS, LAS does have recomplementation. In fact, LAS patterns with ES in that there are two constructions in each variety, i.e. a construction in which an intonational break following the LD is present and a construction in which the break is absent. I argue that the constructions with the break differ from the constructions without it with regard to reconstruction effects, no insertion and the position of high adverbs, which arise due to a locality violation in the former but not in the latter. I propose a syntactic analysis in terms of phases and argue that the locality violation is circumvented in the constructions with no break via verb movement, which is not possible in the constructions with the break. I further propose a mapping from the syntactic structures of recomplementation into prosody that correlates with the presence/absence of the intonational break in these constructions, hence providing prosodic evidence for phasal structure more generally.