Dominican 'ello' as a non-deleted null expletive

Carlos Muñoz Pérez

doi:10.7557/1.3.1.2945

Dominican 'ello' as a non-deleted null expletive

Authors

Carlos Muñoz Pérez Universidad de Buenos Aires

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/1.3.1.2945

Keywords:

Dominican Spanish, overt expletive, null subjects, syntactic variation

Abstract

The Spanish variety spoken in the dominican region of El Cibao (DSEC) has an expletive pronoun ello which is optative and seems to be devoid of any semantic value. This squib aims to present an analysis for this expletive in line with the Strong Uniformity Hypothesis of Chomsky (2001): ello would be nothing but a non-deleted instance of an expletive null subject. The distribution and optionality of this expletive follow from the instability of a definiteness feature in the pronominal expletives of this variety.

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Published

2014-05-13

How to Cite

Muñoz Pérez, C. (2014). Dominican ’ello’ as a non-deleted null expletive. Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 3(1), 155–161. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.3.1.2945