Resumen de Excess, Deficiency, and Mean: Resumptive Pronouns, Prepositional Phrase Chopping, and Gaps in Spanish Oblique Relative Clauses
This study is a variationist account of a threeway alternation found in Spanish oblique relative clauses (RCs): gaps, resumptive pronouns (RPs), and prepositional phrase (PP) chopping. Using four data sets of the variety spoken in Lima, Peru, three separate multivariate analyses were run, showing that each of the variants under scrutiny corresponds to a different set of constraints. First, gaps are favored by RCs containing only verbs, inanimate antecedents, and plural nouns. Secondly, RPs are promoted by animate antecedents, semantically full prepositions, stacked RCs, and indefinite antecedents. Finally, PP-chopping is favored by inanimate and singular antecedents. This article shows, on the one hand, the relevance of animacy in the choice of oblique RC strategies in Spanish. On the other hand, this paper suggests that the variants studied are not affected by the syntactic complexity or simplicity of the structure antecedent + RC, which were thought to correlate, respectively, with difficulty and ease of processing.
