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.