Whose foot is it? Pronominal Possessives in Pro-drop Languages: An Experimental Study

Abstract

We present an experimental study (off-line acceptability rating task) conduced with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish and Italian to verify syntactic constraints on the possessive pronoun-antecedence relation in full pro-drop languages (Italian) and partial pro-drop (Brazilian Portuguese and Finnish). The goal of the investigation was to examine the hypothesis that in full pro-drop languages, null pronouns, as well as overt pronouns, are subject to principle B, although they display a preference for local c-commanding antecedents, while in partial pro-drop languages, they respond to principle A, requiring a local c-commanding antecedent. Three factors were manipulated: type of possessive pronoun (overt vs. null), syntactic configuration regulating the intra-sentential relation between the pronoun and its antecedent (locality and c-command), the interpretation assigned to the pronoun (anaphoric, nonanaphoric and exophoric). The results suggest that the hypothesis is correct, although a significant difference between BP and Finnish was found, showing that Finns has less acceptance of non-anaphoric readings for null pronouns. As for overt pronouns, the picture is more complex, showing differences between languages and conditions. This might reflect interface issues related to recovering and evaluating antecedents.