Object clitics, agreement and dialectal variation

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of object clitics in Spanish and some of its consequences for the theory of agreement and Case. On the empirical side, we present syntactic, morphological and semantic arguments supporting a mixed approach to object clitics where 3rd person Direct Object (DO) cliticization constitutes a genuine case of Determiner movement, but other DO and Indirect Object (IO) clitics are agreement elements. Once third person object clitics are set aside, the emerging picture is a single agreement that does not discriminate between DOs and IOs in the syntax. This idea finds striking support in Basque Leísta Dialect, where there is a 3rd person DO agreement clitic that behaves in all relevant respects like all other agreement clitics. Moreover, the consequences of this analysis extend to other properties of the object relation in Spanish, such as Differential Object Marking (DOM), and dialectal variation in the clitic field. An interesting observation that arises from this study is that the agreement nature of 1st and 2nd person clitics and the whole series of IOs is extremely robust in Spanish and remains invariable across all the dialects analyzed. Variation is thus restricted to 3rd person DO objects, where in contrast the changes are diverse and take very different directions, a fact that raises interesting questions related both to the historical evolution of the clitic system and to the theoretical analysis of Case and agreement.

The formal properties of non paradigmatic 'se'

“…For most parts, the last assumption is not crucial for our analysis in this paper, which is compatible with other proposals deriving the difference between DOM and non-DOM objects. But our analysis fits particularly well to explain not only their different behavior with respect to a large battery of properties in "regular" transitive constructions (seeOrmazabal & Romero 2007, 2013a,b for a thorough argumentation and references), but also to derive the different agreement patterns in SE constructions(Ormazabal &Romero 2019a).…”

“…Regarding person, see discussion in D'Alessandro(2007). Regarding DOM the issue is far more complex than acknowledged in the text (seeTorrego 1998, Leonetti 2008, Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007, Ormazabal & Romero 2013a,c, 2019b, and references therein). for some interesting modifications with important theoretical consequences, seeAlcaraz (2019).…”

Differential Object Marking, Case and Agreement

“…As observed in the literature, the only context where the differential object marker A cannot precede animate specific DOs is when combined with an IO doubled by a clitic (Laca 1995, Zdrojewski 2008, López 2012, Ormazabal & Romero 2013a, Ordóñez & Treviño 2013. In (5a), the IO is not doubled by the clitic and the DO is DOMed; when the clitic doubles the IO, as in (5b), the presence of the A marker is banned.…”

“…Since our analysis will be partially based on the behavior of DOM in ditransitive contexts, a preliminary note is in order concerning our assumptions on dative alternations in Spanish. Following much previous work in the literature (Uriagereka 1988, Demonte 1995, Romero 1997, Rappaport-Hovav & Levin 2008, Ormazabal & Romero 2010, 2013a; see also sections 3. and 4. below) we consider the distinction between Spanish clitic-less and clitic doubled dative constructions as just a particular case of other well known cases of dative alternations in many languages of the world (e.g. to-construction/DOC, applicative constructions, etc.).…”

“…In this paper, we modify a syntactic analysis originally proposed in Ormazabal & Romero (2013a). We present new empirical evidence showing that the set of objects that are subject to DOM is semantically heterogeneous enough not to attempt an approach based strictly on semantic primitives.…”