Tautological relatives and information structure
Abstract
Free relative clauses can give rise to tautological structures, such as El que sabe, sabe (‘He who knows knows’). In this paper, two central questions are addressed: i) How can informative interpretations be obtained from tautological sentences? and ii) Why is the interpretation sensitive to word order? I will show that the interpretation of tautological relatives can be predicted in a straightforward way as the by-product of several factors: the informational status of the constituents, the lexical properties of the predicates, and the operation of general cognitive principles governing human communication.
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