Pronominal structure and the third-person gap in Spanish
Samuel Jambrović
January 2025 

In English, and in many other languages, only first-person and second-person pronouns can immediately precede a noun: we/you/*they linguists. In Spanish, the equivalent construction requires the definite article but otherwise exhibits the same third-person gap: nosotros/vosotros/ustedes/*ellos los lingüistas ‘we/you (informal)/you/they the linguists’. Given the morphological similarity between ellos ‘they’ and los ‘the’, one might attribute the problem with *ellos los lingüistas to the pronoun and the definite article competing for the same syntactic position, such as D. However, the fact that *ellos lingüistas ‘they linguists’ is ungrammatical as well suggests that a deeper issue is a play. In this paper, I argue that third-person pronouns like ellos spell out multiple heads in the noun phrase, including n and Div, provided that these heads are structurally adjacent. Not only does this analysis capture the inability of third-person pronouns to take nominal complements (*ellos lingüistas), but it also predicts their intolerance of restrictive relative clauses (*solo ellos que tienen pasaporte ‘only they who have a passport’), which enter the derivation below D and interrupt the chain of heads that are realized by these forms.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008427 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
keywords:	pronouns, determiners, person, third-person gap, spanish, apposition, unagreement, relative clauses, honorificity, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [September 2024]
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