Fission in Romance demonstrative-reinforcer constructions

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to Romance demonstrative-reinforcer constructions. The account is based on a binary valued feature system for deictic person and is embedded in the Distributed Morphology framework. Looking at data from Romance varieties, some (implicit) shortcomings of previous accounts are repaired via a morphological operation: Fission. Specifically, those accounts do not provide formal means to make sense of the deictic compatibility constraint between the demonstrative and its reinforcer, nor do they discuss categorisation issues relative to reinforcers. Via Fission, instead, a featural reason is given to ensure deictic compatibility, and I put forward a new approach to the category of reinforcers, aiming to overcome their problematic categorisation as DP-internal adverbs.