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The Spanish variety spoken in the dominican region of El Cibao (DSEC) has an expletive pronoun <em>ello</em> 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 <em>Strong Uniformity Hypothesis</em> of Chomsky (2001): <em>ello</em> 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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AbstractThis paper offers an argument to analyse the Spanish form /a/ as a syncretic case marker for accusative differential object marking (dom) and dative. The literature on free relative clauses has established that syncretism allows the repair of feature mismatches arising from contradictory selectional requirements between the matrix and the embedded predicates. By combining clitic left dislocation constructions (CLLD) and free relatives, it is shown here that dom and dative grant the same repairing effect in Spanish, so it follows that they must be syncretic categories. The same type of configuration distinguishes the directional preposition a and the dative case marker, which is taken to indicate that these elements are mere homophones in the language. Furthermore, an analysis of the repairing effect of syncretism is offered.

In Spanish, combining an indefinite plural article and a cardinal number leads to an approximative interpretation similar to that provided by approximators like ‘approximately’. In this paper, we advance a syntactic and semantic analysis of these structures. We show that the construction shares a number of properties with structures containing explicit approximative elements, so it justified to assume that a particular constituent contributes the approximative meaning. We propose that an approximative morpheme Approx is combined with the cardinal number; the morphological realization of this morpheme is as the plural affix on the indefinite article. We advance a denotation for Approx, and elaborate the necessary assumptions on the functioning of numerals for our analysis to work at a general level.