La duplicació pronominal en les relatives locatives en català

Abstract

Summary: This paper analyses the use of the pronoun hi in locative relative clauses in Catalan, which is considered a case of clitic doubling. How it behaves depends on whether it is a defining or non-defining relative clause. The nature of focus of the non-defining clause justifies the presence of the pronoun which acts as a topic’s resumptive pronoun, whereas the pronoun appears in a defining relative clause when the sentence is characterised by specificity. On the other hand, there are two relevant syntactic factors in the appearance of the pronoun hi: the first is the aim to avoid confusions with the pronoun hi with syntactic function – not only in non-defining but also in defining relative clauses – and the second is the fact that the explicit presence of verbal arguments contributes specificity to the defining relative clause. These two factors are also relevant with regard to the acceptability of combinations of the pronoun hi with other pronouns. [Keywords: Locative relative clause; clitic doubling; specificity; pronoun hi; verbal complements]