A Romance Construction With Constrained Coreference

Pronouns are commonly considered as linguistic items which supply a way of avoiding redundancy through mere reference to something previously (anaphoric reference) or subsequently (cataphoric reference) expressed in the discourse. In this paper we provide evidence that there are numerous situations where the pronouns refer to linguistic items, having particular syntactic function, holding together an obligatory co-reference relation. Co-referential items occur as arguments of a predicative term = : Vsup N where Vsup is ser or estar (to be), and N a predicative noun. Although the present description mainly concerns Spanish and Portuguese, we believe that it also applies to other Romance languages.