Rodrigo on WCO with Masha

Weak Crossover in Spanish relative clauses.

Now out in Probus, "Weak crossover in Spanish relative clauses," from alumnus Rodrigo Ranero along with UC Irvine's Gregory Scontras and our own Masha Polinsky. Abstracted below, the article finds, contrary to prior literature, that Spanish relative clauses do show WCO, particularly when the relative pronoun is que.

We investigate the status of weak crossover violations (WCO) in Spanish restrictive relative clauses. Claims in the literature lead to the expectation that Spanish does not show sensitivity to WCO in this context; however, ours is the first systematic investigation of the phenomenon in the language. We find that Spanish restrictive relative clauses do exhibit WCO violations: when the relative clause is headed by que, participants rate crossover configurations lower than configurations without crossover; when the relative clause is introduced by a quien, the status of WCO violations is less clear. We consider two explanations for our results in a quien clauses: potential structural differences between que and a quien, and the possibility for an appositive parse for some of our a quien configurations. Our results set the stage for further cross-linguistic investigations of crossover phenomena.