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Completive Todo in Rioplatense Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Carolina Fraga
Carolina Fraga*
Affiliation:
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
*
[cfraga@gradcenter.cuny.edu]
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Abstract

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL'). In this article I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g. Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There's water over the whole bathroom floor'). I argue that the syntax and the interpretation of this construction can be explained only if todo ‘all’ is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that todo is the modifier of a PP headed by the silent preposition WITH, and that the nominal that agrees with todo is the complement of this silent P. This analysis sheds light on the structure of existential sentences and supports the view put forth in Levinson 2011, contra Freeze 1992, that a single underlying structure for possessive structures cannot be maintained.

Keywords

todoallexistentialspossessionsilent WITHsilent SPACESpanish

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , June 2022, pp. 290 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

First and foremost I would like to express my immense gratitude to Christina Tortora for her generous help, encouragement, feedback, and guidance in the preparation of this work. I would also like to thank Jason Kandybowicz, Richard Kayne, and Jon Nissenbaum for invaluable discussion of the ideas in this article. Last but not least, I am very grateful to the Language editorial board and to two anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. All errors are mine.

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