On Phases and Prosodic Reflexes in Spanish Recomplementation

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 In this presentation, I address the structure of the Spanish left periphery contrasting Latin American Spanish (LAS) and European Spanish (ES) with regard to recomplementation (double-complementizer constructions). ES has been argued to have two different structures involving left-dislocated elements, depending on whether or not the element in question is followed by another complementizer. I show that while LAS does not allow double-complementizer constructions it actually does have the two structures for left-dislocated elements that ES has and argue that what crucially matters here is the presence vs. absence of a prosodic boundary following the left dislocate, not the presence vs. absence of the lower complementizer. Furthermore, I observe a number of syntactic differences between the two structures involving left-dislocated elements, linking these differences to a difference in the height of V-movement. The proposal made in this respect is two-fold. I first make a syntactic proposal in terms of phases. I then address how the syntactic structures of recomplementation are mapped into prosody.