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- Romance Linguistics 2009
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Romanian genderless pronouns and parasitic gaps
- Author(s): Ion Giurgea 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy & University of Constance
- Source: Romance Linguistics 2009 , pp 231-248
- Publication Date November 2010
I argue that the distribution of (overt) object clitics and null objects in Romanian can be explained if we assume that the so-called “neuter pronouns” of Romanian are genderless. I show that Romanian has a null object used as a bound variable with a neuter pronoun antecedent. This item differs from parasitic gaps by the fact that it does not require an A-bar moved antecedent and can only occur with neuter pronouns, while overt clitics are excluded in this context. I propose that this is due to the fact that object clitics are always marked for gender, while neuter pronouns are genderless. I present independent evidence for the proposal that the so-called “neuter pronouns” of Romanian and other Romance languages, definite as well as indefinite and quantificational, lack a value for Gender.
- Affiliations: 1: Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy & University of Constance
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