On null complement anaphora in Spanish and Italian.

This paper provides evidence from Spanish and Italian for the distinction between deep and surface anaphora as first proposed by Hankamer and Sag's (1976). We observe that certain verbs in Spanish and Italian allow their infinitival/clausal complements to be null. However, sentences containing them become ungrammatical when we try to extract an element that would have appeared inside the clausal complement in the non-null version, such as a clitic, a wh-phrase, etc ... or when restructuring has occurred. We propose, and provide evidence that these null clausal complements in Spanish and Italian are instances of Null Complement Anaphora, a type of deep anaphor in Hankamer and Sag's (1976) sense and not an instance of surface anaphor such as VP ellipsis in English. We claim that Null Complement Anaphors and deep anaphors in general are elements' that do not have internal structure in the syntax, and therefore cannot host a trace. They contrast with surface anaphors which do have internal structure in the syntax and can host a trace, allowing for extraction out of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]