Possessives and relative clauses in Spanish

Abstract In this paper, the properties of Spanish DPs including a possessive pronoun and a relative clause are thoroughly described and analyzed. Adopting a raising analysis for both prenominal possessives and restrictive relatives, it is claimed that the incompatibility of a determiner possessive and a restrictive relative in current standard Spanish is due to the violation of an interpretive constraint sanctioning subextraction from [Spec, CP]. It is further proposed that, in constructions in which a possessive pronoun does combine with a relative clause, the possessive is not subextracted from [Spec, CP]. It is finally shown that this proposal accounts for different well-formed dialectal and Old Spanish patterns with a prenominal possessive and a restrictive relative and also applies to data from other Romance languages.