A uniform account of headless relatives in Spanish

This article focuses on the syntactic analysis of Free Relatives, Semi-Free Relatives and Free-Choice Relatives in Spanish. All of them are headless relatives, that is, constructions which have a sentential form but nominal interpretation and distribution. My proposal is that they can be treated as mixed categories with two substructures: an illocutionary verbal domain (a relative clause) and a nominal domain, connected through a nominalizer functional projection. Headless relatives are thus conceived here as syntactically equivalent to headed relatives, with a recategorizer NomP in place of the lexical antecedent and the differences between the three particular constructions are shown to follow from alternative (an independently motivated) strategies of valuation of an edge feature in NomP. The article also explores the implications of an analysis of this sort for a cross-linguistic account of headless relatives.