This paper analyzes certain restrictions on polarity focus marking in clauses embedded under emotive factive predicates. It argues that these restrictions arise because this configuration leads to a systematic presupposition failure in virtue of its focus value, which I call impossible presupposition. The main argument offered here supporting this approach involves some novel asymmetries with factive clauses in predicate doubling construction in Spanish. From a theoretical perspective, the larger agenda of this article is to provide new evidence that certain types of ungrammaticality are due to semantic-pragmatic factors, namely, logical triviality.
Spanish allows to focus the Number and Person features of the verbal inflection to produce an interpretation similar to that of a contrastively focused pronoun. This squib discusses two properties distinguishing both phenomena.
Campos (1986) argues that object drop in Spanish exhibits island effects. This claim has remained unchallenged up to today and is largely assumed in the literature. In this paper, I show that this characterization is not empirically correct: given a proper discourse context, null objects can easily appear within a syntactic island in Spanish. This observation constitutes a non-trivial problem for object drop analyses based on movement.
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