A special type of left dislocation in Galician and Portuguese: the D-construction
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Abstract
This text analyses the here dubbed D-construction in Galician and European Portuguese, composed of a determiner phrase (DP) followed by a demonstrative pronoun and a main clause. This quite unexplored contruction is described as a strategy to promote a referent into the sentence topic and at the same time contrasting it to other salient members of a partially ordered set, by means of the analysis of its pragmatic and prosodic aspects. An existing analysis supposing an appositive role for the demonstrative is argued against, thus strengthening the idea that DP and demonstrative do not form a single constituent. By means of a series of intuition tests, the D-construction is characterised as an instance of Hanging Topic Left Dislocation of a kind found in Germanic languages. Finally, a unified account is put forward for Galician and Portuguese, whenever the structure includes a coreferent clitic in the main clause. In this case the DP is assigned a position in a Frame projection (FrameP), whereas the demonstrative is a base-generated topic in the left periphery, connected to the clitic by long-distance agreement. In European Portuguese, where the structure may also occur without a resumptive clitic, the demonstrative can move into Spec,IP. Either of these are the first part of the derivation, respectively identical to Clitic Left Dislocation or Topicalisation. The paper concludes that the D-construction must be considered a marked syntactic construction on its own terms, and considers some possible themes for future research.
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