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Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Amsterdam 2013
Edited by Enoch O. Aboh, Jeannette Schaeffer and Petra Sleeman
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 8] 2015
► pp. 21–38

Romance causatives and object shift

| UAB | CLT
The goal of this paper is to offer a unified analysis for a syntactic phenomenon found in the context of Spanish and Romanian causatives. The study focuses on causative constructions with ‘make’ that allow lexical subjects in a preverbal complement position and which present ECM effects. We claim that this preverbal subject position comes to be available in the two languages due to a more general property of these languages of having different word orders available in a sentence, and more specifically, due to the possibility of providing themselves with the VOS sequence through the strategy of object shift (as previously argued by Ordóñez 1998, 2007; Gallego 2007, 2010, 2013, for Spanish; and Alboiu 1999, 2002, for Romanian). We also argue that the availability of DOM with causatives in these two languages can be linked to the building of a dedicated position for the embedded subject through object shift.
Published online: 2 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.8.02ciu
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