Clausal Prolepsis

Dutch and several other languages allow a pronoun that occupies the verb’s object position to double an embedded clause, e.g. I resent it greatly that I did not call you. In this work, I take up the challenging question of how exactly the pronoun and the embedded clause relate to one another in the underlying syntax. Several previous analyses have been proposed to address this question. The main innovation of this project is that it takes the morphological form of the pronoun to provide the key to understanding how the pronoun and the CP relate to one another in the underlying syntactic structure; in particular, the paper pays particular a.ention to the fact that in Dutch—the language this project is focusing on—the doubling pronoun, het is also used as a defnite determiner. Besides this fact, this work takes into consideration facts related to pronominal binding, clausal selection, the interpretive properties of embedded clauses, topicalization, and the differences between personal and demonstrative pronouns as well as a new generalization suggesting that clausal prolepsis is possible in all and only those contexts that allow for a propositional usage of the pronoun. Building on recent theoretical insights into the structure of the nominal constituent, I propose an analysis according to which clausal prolepsis realizes a case of nominalization. Concretely, I assume that clausal prolepsis realizes by a syntactic structure in which the pronoun realizes a D head, and an idx head which in turn takes the CP as its complement, i.e. [DP D [idxP idx CP]]. It is shown that this analysis has a number of advantages over previous ones in accounting for the various properties of clausal prolepsis. Furthermore, as the underlying structure of clausal prolepsis parallels the syntactic structure that has been proposed for nominalized clauses in several other languages, a broader conclusion of the paper is that nominalization of a clause is more pervasive cross-linguistically than is typically assumed.

This paper explores the syntax of clausal prolepsis in Dutch, with a specific focus on object clausal prolepsis, the phenomenon where an object pronoun is linked to a CP that is situated at the right edge of the clause. The paper presents new evidence that distinguishes Dutch clausal prolepsis cases where the embedded CP conveys a familiar or a factive interpretation. Previous analyses of clausal prolepsis in other languages, such as German, have proposed two radically different syntactic structures to capture the meaning differences of these two cases. However, this paper proposes a more uniform syntactic structure that reconciles them. The proposed analysis considers clausal prolepsis to realize an underlying syntactic structure of a nominalized clause, similar to structures found in Greek, Persian, and Washo. This analysis captures the meaning differences straightforwardly expressed by clausal prolepsis, using a single lexical D-entry and independently attested structural components that can be merged with D. Furthermore, the proposed lexical entry can be extended to uses of the proleptic pronoun in different contexts, such as a definite D, thus avoiding accidental homophony. Additional advantages of the proposed analysis are that it can capture a new generalization describing with which predicates clausal prolepsis is possible in Dutch as well as other aspects of the distribution of clausal prolepsis such as that in Dutch, it is only allowed with verbs or infinitives, but not with nominals. From a theoretical standpoint, the proposed analysis teases apart factivity from familiarity and shows that familiarity does not arise through D but through nominal structure that can be merged with D. From an empirical perspective, the paper concludes that nominalization of a clause is more pervasive cross-linguistically than is usually assumed. Lastly, this study evaluates earlier accounts of clausal prolepsis and shows that those involving a CP base generated in an extraposed position, like the one in Bennis (1986), are not tenable. This is also true for other analyses taking the distribution of the prolepsed CP to be a consequence of phonological rules. Instead, the paper shows that the only necessary mechanism to explain the distribution of the prolepsed CP is Merge, in conjunction with standard assumptions regarding constituency structure.