ON PRONOMINALIZATION CONSTRAINTS IN CATALAN: THE ROLE OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE

Abstract

Although it is true that some pronominalization phenomena are restricted by grammatical or semantic factors, others are better accounted for on informational grounds. Pronominalization is triggered not only by material which is omitted but also by material which is dislocated; therefore, the informational status of pronominalizable strings should also be taken into account, since thematic material must always occupy a dislocated position in Catalan, and dislocation may require clitic binding. Furthermore, as in Catalan sentence structure is intimately associated with prosody (with primary accent marking sentence boundary), considering the relationship between structure and prosody is vital for a unified account on pronominalization, since by doing so, some grammatical phenomena ruled out by some constraints posited in the literature will be accounted for.