| Summary: | This paper investigates relative clauses as in (...) ho s(enh)or dom ãRique gouernador Comprou a dona guyomar de meneses molher q(ue) foi de symão fogaça (...) (lit. ‘the Mr. Dom ãRique, governor, bought from Dona guyomar de meneses, woman that was of symão fogaça’), which occurred in literary and non-literary Medieval Portuguese texts, but are not possible in Modern Portuguese. The central goal of this paper is to describe and analyse the syntactic and semantic properties of these constructions, whose existence has not been mentioned in the Historical Portuguese Grammars nor in the reference works on the History of Portuguese Language. The claim is that these relative clauses have a gap in a postcopular position (predicate of the copular sentence) and that this striking particularity contributes to the specific semantic properties that they exhibit. As far as the syntactic analysis is concerned, the non-adjacency between the head noun and the PP is explained by the combination of the ‘raising analysis’ of relative clauses and the copy theory of movement. As for the syntactic change w.r.t. the non-adjacency between the head noun and the PP, it is claimed that the mechanism that allowed the realization of different pieces of different chain links (‘scattered deletion’) is not allowed anymore, at least at the DP level. This change can explain why in Modern Portuguese we find a less transparent relation between syntax and information structure
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