Abstract
This article focuses on one aspect of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP hereafter) direct object ellipsis. In BP animate direct objects cannot be elided when they are definite. Using feature geometry (Harley, Heidi & Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pronouns. Language 78. 482–526) as a theoretical tool, I propose that the interaction between the features responsible for animacy and the features responsible for definiteness in the verb allow to explain such a restriction. Crucially, the organizing node class (related to animacy, and which is the main feature in the ellipsis operation) would have suffered an impoverishment in BP. This impoverishment (an operation that deletes morphosyntactic features post-syntactically) would cause that certain objects cannot be elided. The proposed interaction between animacy features and grammaticalized pragmatic features (specificity, definiteness) makes it feasible to explicitly relate the operation of nominal ellipsis to other phenomena such as differential object marking (DOM).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments. All errors are my own.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The status of /f/ in Mayan-accented Spanish
- “Fallo garrafal y común entre vascoparlantes:” attitudes and salience of grammatical gender agreement in Basque-Spanish contact
- Animacy in the Brazilian Portuguese null object
- Genericity expression in child heritage Spanish
- “From left to right”: the influence of political orientation on the language attitudes of the population of Palma toward Catalan and Spanish
- The L2 phonetic developmental trajectory of native English learners of Spanish across a semester-long study abroad program
- The acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive by child heritage and L2 learners: evidence from a dual language program
- ‘Disfluency’ features in bilingual speech: meaning and methodology
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The status of /f/ in Mayan-accented Spanish
- “Fallo garrafal y común entre vascoparlantes:” attitudes and salience of grammatical gender agreement in Basque-Spanish contact
- Animacy in the Brazilian Portuguese null object
- Genericity expression in child heritage Spanish
- “From left to right”: the influence of political orientation on the language attitudes of the population of Palma toward Catalan and Spanish
- The L2 phonetic developmental trajectory of native English learners of Spanish across a semester-long study abroad program
- The acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive by child heritage and L2 learners: evidence from a dual language program
- ‘Disfluency’ features in bilingual speech: meaning and methodology