No abstract

In this chapter, the different positions regarding NCA in the literature are discussed and the analysis proposed in Hankamer and Sag (1976) is favored. NCA is taken to be a type of deep anaphor as opposed to a surface anaphor, in Hankamer and Sag’s proposed typology. It behaves like a deep anaphor in that it can take pragmatic antecedents, missing antecedents, and does not seem to require strict syntactic parallelism with its antecedent. In addition, NCA does not allow overt or covert extraction out of it, which provides evidence in favor of the view that NCA is to be represented as an element with no internal syntactic structure. It is also shown that the types of predicates that select NCA seem to be lexically determined, since no reliable pattern has yet been found to be able to predict which predicates select it.

In this paper we present empirical evidence for the existence of person restrictions across five constructions which exhibit non-canonical agreement patterns in Spanish. We account for these data by adopting a Multiple Agree approach à la Anagnostopoulou (2005, 2017) and D’Alessandro (2007) where T/INFL can agree with two different elements as long as there is no person feature incompatibility. We also show that there are person restrictions in non-canonical agreement constructions with parecer in Spanish (contra Mare and Pato, 2018), once we set aside the “look-like” interpretation of parecer. In addition, we provide empirical evidence for the claim that usted(es) behaves as an “imposter” as expected by Collins and Ordóñez (2021) analysis.