Clitic Doubling in a Doubling World

Abstract

This chapter places Clitic Doubling in Argentinean Spanish into the broad perspective of pronominal doubling phenomena. A series of diagnostics is presented based on the interaction of Clitic Doubling with its PF/pragmatic effects, on the one hand, and its syntactic/LF effects, on the other. An important conclusion is that Clitic Doubling must be kept apart from Clitic Right Dislocation and Clitic Left Dislocation. Clitic Doubling is thus conceived of the morphological reflex of the abstract composition of object DPs; concretely, it is an A-dependency triggered whenever the object possesses a [person]-feature, an observation called the Person Feature Condition. So, under the minimal assumption that [3P] features can be optionally encoded on lexical DPs in Argentinean Spanish, but that it is only specified for pronouns in other Spanish dialects, variation facts associated with this phenomenon are explained. By the same token, the different behavior of doubled and nondoubled objects in several syntactic/LF configurations also follows.

Clitic doubling in Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish: a comparative corpus investigation

“…We expect that independent of the mediumlater stages of development always include the earlier ones but not the other way around. A similar conclusion is reached in recent work by Di Tullio et al (2019). The authors assume that CD is triggered by a person feature in pronouns/lexical DPs.…”

“…As already mentioned above, grammatical factors such as the syntactic category (pronominal vs. non-pronominal), case (accusative vs. dative) and the presence or absence of DOM have been discussed (Kayne, 1975;Fontana, 1993;Fernández Soriano, 1999;Anagnostopoulou, 2003;Leonetti, 2007aLeonetti, , 2008Heusinger & Onea, 2008;Zdrojewski 2008;Zdrojewski 2012, 2013;Di Tullio et al, 2019). In addition, semantic and pragmatic factors like specificity (Suñer, 1988;Enç, 1991;Gerlach, 2002), definiteness (Leonetti, 2007a(Leonetti, , 2008, animacy (Suñer, 1988;Colantoni, 2002), or a combination of them (Parodi, 1998) have been suggested to be influential for CD as well as discourse factors like e.g.…”

“…(Suñer, 1988 (Barrenechea y Orecchia, 1977:368) This view has been challenged in more recent studies (cf. Zdrojewski, 2008;Zdrojewski, 2012, 2013;Di Tullio et al, 2019), which argue that examples like (8a-b) are cases of CLRD, because the DP object cannot be analyzed as being focused or part of the focus domain. Among other arguments, the authors claim, that in examples like (8a-b), the main stress falls on the constituent preceding the object and the direct object undergoes deaccentuation (cf.…”

“…A number of authors have proposed that the extension of CD to direct nominal objects in Rioplatense Spanish reflects an advancement in the diachronic development of CD (Leonetti, 2007a;Gabriel and Rinke, 2010;Sánchez and Zdrojewski, 2013;Pujalte and Saab, 2018;Di Tullio, Saab and Zdrojewski, 2019). Leonetti (2007a:135) proposes that this advancement follows the definiteness scale in (5).…”

“…Some studies (e.g. Suñer, 1988;Belloro, 2007;Di Tullio et al, 2019) are based on the corpus El Habla Culta de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Barrenechea 1987). This corpus varies in both the number of interlocutors and the level of formality, ranging from a university lecture to the informal dialogue [...] (Belloro 2007: 72).…”