Is there hyper-raising in European Portuguese?

Abstract

Several languages allow for hyper-raising, a structure in which a DP that is interpreted as the subject of a finite complement clause is spelled-out as the subject of the matrix clause. Hyper-raising challenges certain core concepts of syntactic theory related to movement and locality. Various proposals have been made for analysing these structures, the main difference being whether the final position of the DP results from movement or not. It has often been assumed that European Portuguese, in contrast to Brazilian Portuguese, does not allow hyper-raising, or only allows it in very limited contexts. In this paper, we present empirical data extracted from written corpora and experimental results attesting to the production and acceptance of hyper-raising structures by a number of native speakers of European Portuguese. We contribute to identifying the contexts that favour hyper-raising in this variety and outline a preliminary analysis to explain what leads these speakers to produce and accept hyper-raising, while many others systematically reject it. In our proposal, this difference results from the properties of the embedded functional heads T and C, and the way in which their formal features are checked. Specifically, we propose that those speakers dissociate Case features from person-number features.