Cortadora relative clauses: A comparative analysis between Spanish, Portuguese and French

Abstract

This paper focuses on cortadora relative clauses – or non-pronominal relative clauses –, a special type of relativization registered in Rio de la Plata Spanish varieties, in which the preposition is deleted or ‘chopped’ (‘cortada’). This phenomenon is an example of preposition optionality and has been previously studied in Brazilian and European Portuguese, and French within the framework of generative grammar. The main goal of this paper is to show that this syntactic-discursive phenomenon is basically the same in all these three closely related Romance languages, following the works of Kato (2010), Valer (2008), and Tarallo (1983) for Portuguese, Bouchard (1981) for French, and Caviglia & Malcuori (2007) for Spanish. Only inherent prepositions (a, de, con, en, and por) can be deleted, and the position of the topic in Topic Phrases is the one relativised in cortadora relative clauses. The data used for Spanish examples come from the COLEM-Argentina and Uruguay corpora (COLEM: Corpus oral de la lengua española en Montreal).

Keywords

• Cortadora Relative Clauses
• Preposition Optionality
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• French