Chapter 10. On certain distributional gaps of Spanish possessives

In this paper I focus on the odd distribution of Spanish prepositional possessives inside nominals, and offer an explanation of those facts on the basis of a “Phrasal Spell-Out” approach to lexical insertion (cf. Caha 2009; Fábregas 2007a, 2007b, 2010). The core of the proposal is that certain contrasts much emphasized in previous accounts, like the one between weak and strong pronouns, are irrelevant for the problem at issue. Instead, I derive the distributional pattern of Spanish possessives by relying on feature contrasts like Oblique/Genitive, [±participant] and [±number], which provide the right natural classes for those elements.