Dative Doubling in Non-Mandatory Contexts in European Spanish

This chapter deals with clitic doubling in Mac and Bg. It should be of broader significance because, among other things, clitic doubling is not associated with a preposition in SI, as it is in the Romance languages, and because it has become grammaticalized as an obligatory marker of specificity in Mac. There are two classes of questions concerning clitic doubling in Mac and Bg. The first is when it occurs; that is, what semantic and discourse factors license clitic doubling. This question is of particular concern in these and other Balkan languages in which not all objects and indirect objects are doubled. The second question is how clitic doubling can be analyzed syntactically; that is, how both the clitic and the doubled argument can be assigned a theta-role. These questions can be, and often are, addressed separately because a given set of semantic and discourse lincensors of clitic doubling may be compatible with a number of syntactic analyses and vice versa. Note that there is a large literature on clitic doubling; of primary relevance to us is that on the Balkan languages because clitic doubling in Greek (Anagnostopoulou 1994; Schneider-Zioga 1994; Anagnostopoulou and Giannakidou 1995), Romanian (Dobrovie-Sorin 1990), and Albanian {Kallulli 1995) is similar to clitic doubling in Mac and Bg (Rudin 1996, 1997; Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Hellan 1991, 1996; Alexandrova 1997; Guentcheva 1994).

The current study compares the distribution of clitic doubling (CD) in two varieties of Spanish: Peninsular Spanish and Rioplatense Spanish. Based on two corpora of colloquial speech we investigate under which conditions CD with pronominal and nominal objects[1] is possible and which factors favour the occurrence of CD in the variable contexts.Based on a variationist analysis with Rbrul, we show that personal prounouns are almost categorically doubled in both corpora. The presence of dative case marking is a sufficient condition for CD to be possible with pronominal and nominal objects. This is in principle independent of semantic factors like definiteness, specificity and animacy, which also favour CD. In Rioplatense, CD of dative noun phrases is advanced in comparison to Peninsular Spanish as it is almost categorical and independent of the semantic specification of the object, whereas specificity still plays a role for CD of dative nominal objects in Peninsular Spanish. CD of accusative objects occurs less frequently and is more restricted. Non-personal pronouns show that definiteness is a necessary and decisive feature for CD of accusatives, indefinite non-personal pronouns cannot be doubled. In Buenos Aires, doubling of direct nominal objects also presupposes their definiteness (and specificity). DOM favours CD to occur, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for CD.Overall, our study confirms that the factors determining the distribution of CD can be ordered on an implicational (definiteness) scale and that CD has a wider distribution and is less restricted in Rioplatense Spanish in comparison to Peninsular Spanish. We conclude that this reflects that Rioplatense Spanish has reached a more advanced stage of CD on a grammaticalization cline than Peninsular Spanish[1] Throughout our paper, we use the terms pronominal and nominal objects in order to distinguish between pronouns and non-pronominal noun phrases in object position, although it is of course clear to us that pronouns are also nominal objects. We will also use the abbreviation DP (determiner phrase) to refer to non-pronominal noun phrases.

This paper investigates the extent to which clitic resumption in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) of accusative and dative objects is compulsory in two varieties of Spanish, namely, Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish. We report the findings of an acceptability judgment task that compares sentences with dislocated direct and indirect objects with and without resumption. The study is motivated by two observations in cases without dislocation. First, in Peninsular Spanish, clitic doubling with dative objects is optional but doubling of accusative objects is very marginal. Second, in Rioplatense Spanish, doubling of accusatives is available under specific conditions. Although the results confirm that resumption in CLLD structures is strongly preferred across varieties and object types, differences between dative vs. accusative clitics are reflected to some extent in CLLD structures in Peninsular Spanish. Concerning cross-dialectal differences between Peninsular vs. Rioplatense Spanish, we propose an account that relies on the availability of null accusative clitics in Rioplatense in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

The present paper examines the specificities in object clitic doubling in two Balkan Romance languages, Romanian and Aromanian, and two Balkan Slavic languages, Macedonian and Bulgarian. Having illustrated, the conditions on clitic doubling in Romanian, Aromanian, Macedonian and Bulgarian, we analyse and compare these conditions. It is pointed out that the conditions on clitic doubling in Aromanian and Macedonian are almost analogous – definiteness plays a central role in clitic doubling of the direct objects of the two languages, whereas the clitic doubling of indirect objects mainly depends on specificity. The conditions on clitic doubling in Romanian and Bulgarian differ substantially from the conditions on clitic doubling in the Balkan languages with which they are in close genetic relationships. In both Romanian and Bulgarian, clitic doubling depends on discourse factors, but the types and usage of these factors are idiosyncratic. In Bulgarian, all topicalized definite objects are clitic-doubled, while the indefinite topicalized objects are clitic-doubled only under specific conditions. In Romanian, the cliticization of both direct and indirect objects is typically triggered by topicality and specificity, while direct object clitic doubling is, in addition, triggered by humanness. We argue that object clitic doubling results from a centuries-long socio-linguistic contact in an environment in which direct inter-translatability is needed. Clitic doubling in Macedonian and Aromanian occurs under almost identical conditions, because the two languages have for a long time been in such an environment. When the object clitic doubling phenomenon spreads in areas where no direct inter-translatability is required, distinct phenomena appear.

This volume is a collection of articles on clitic doubling, a phenomenon that has preoccupied generative linguists since the 1980s, when its theoretical importance was noted. Clitic doubling is prevalent in the Balkan languages. However, generative studies initially dealt with its properties in Romance languages, with the Balkan patterns coming increasingly into focus. Since the mid-nineties, these patterns presented a variety of challenges to the generalisations reached on the basis of Romance, while also raising new research questions. The volume deals among other things with the following aspects of the phenomenon: its extension within and outside the Balkan Sprachbund and the observed variation; its realizational possibilities and the constraints on the status of the doubled DP (direct or indirect object, pronominal or non-pronominal); its semantics (definite, specific, presupposed, neither) and pragmatics (topic or not, D-linked or not); its temporal and locational genesis; the relationship between the clitic and its associate.

In Modern Greek, clitic doubling is a grammatical device that marks clitic doubled object NPs as topics. Clitic doubling involving the fronting of the clitic doubled NP is called topicalization or, if combined with a boundary pause, topic left-dislocation. Topic left-dislocation is obligatory in the presence of a preverbal focused NP. Clitic doubling involving the backing of the clitic doubled NP is called backgrounding or, if combined with a boundary pause, topic right-dislocation. Right-dislocated topics are interpreted as an afterthought. In Ancient Greek, clitic doubling was an occasional mnemotechnic device to clarify the referent of a left-dislocated topic usually separated by an intervening clause from the verb on which it depended. Topic right-dislocation existed in Ancient Greek as a device to clarify or specify the referent of a clitic pronoun. The grammaticalization of clitic doubling can be traced back to the use of hanging topics, in which case the doubling clitic was needed to specify the grammatical relation of the corresponding hanging topic as direct or indirect object. The construction was grammaticalized in the Medieval period, when clitic doubling positively marked clitic doubled NPs as topics. In Asia Minor Greek, clitic doubling serves exactly the same purposes as in Medieval and Standard Modern Greek. Turkish interference appears in the existence of a definite and an indefinite accusative to mark topic and focus respectively and possibly the preponderance of SOV as the unmarked order.

Previous studies have demonstrated that in spontaneous speech, Rioplatense Spanish speakers—in contrast to speakers of Peninsular Spanish—sometimes produce clitic-doubled accusative nominal objects. If this contrast between varieties reflects different grammatical systems, it would be expected to also affect the acceptability of clitic doubling across varieties. We tested this hypothesis in a judgment study that compared the acceptability of dative and accusative clitic-doubled objects between Rioplatense and Peninsular Spanish speakers. Speakers of both varieties showed similar preferences with dative clitic doubling, consistent with previous work. By contrast, accusative clitic doubling was highly acceptable in Rioplatense Spanish, but not in Peninsular Spanish. Based on accounts of the diachronic development of clitic doubling, we argue that the Rioplatense speakers exhibit a diachronically advanced behavior compared to Peninsular Spanish speakers.

In this chapter I investigate the syntax of clitic doubling constructions focusing on the question of variation within and across languages. In the course of the discussion, two different patterns of clitic doubling emerge, with different factors causing variation across languages in each case. In the first case – direct object (DO) clitic doubling – languages vary with respect to whether they permit it: (i) only with pronouns or also with DPs; (ii) with humans, animates, or also with inanimates; and (iii) with specific indefinites, partitives, or only definites. DO clitic doubling of DPs is generally optional (doubling of pronouns is in many cases obligatory). In the second case – indirect object (IO) doubling – languages vary with respect to whether (i) doubling is obligatory in the double object construction or (ii) doubling is optional in the double object construction. The research on clitic doubling is presented from a historical perspective focusing on the nature of the Clitic Doubling Parameter and its potential implications for the syntax of cliticization.

In the Balkan Slavic languages, whose dialects actually form a dialectal continuum, clitic doubling shows gradual variation along a vertical north-south axis and a horizontal east-west axis. On the north-south axis, there is variation with respect to the categories that can be clitic-doubled. On the east-west axis languages/dialects vary with respect to the conditions on clitic doubling, with almost total dependence on discourse factors in the easternmost dialects in the area and remarkable dependence on grammatical factors in the westernmost ones. In the majority of the Macedonian dialects discourse factors do not play any role and all definite direct objects and all specific indirect objects are clitic doubled. In Western Macedonia, the vertical north-south axis and the horizontal east-west axis along which clitic doubling variation in Balkan Slavic moves, intersect, so that in the Western Macedonian dialects, as well as in Standard Macedonian, which is based on the West-Central dialects, clitic doubling is obligatory with all definite direct and all specific indirect objects. In the case of indirect objects, the specificity effect does not always hold; even non-articled NPs, which are never specific, can sometimes be clitic doubled. Accordingly, in Western and Standard Macedonian the doubling clitic is becoming a mere case marker of the object it doubles. In Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, two Romance Balkan languages which are in close contact with the Western Macedonian dialects, the conditions for clitic doubling are analogous to those in Macedonian. This fact leads to the conclusion that the grammaticalization of the doubling clitic is an areal phenomenon.

Reviewed by: To the Right of the Verb: An Investigation of Clitic Doubling and Right Dislocation in Three Spanish Dialects by Valeria A. Belloro Glen Heinrich-Wallace To the Right of the Verb: An Investigation of Clitic Doubling and Right Dislocation in Three Spanish Dialects. Belloro, Valeria A. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. Pp. 168. ISBN 978-1-44388-039-8. To the Right of the Verb draws from pragmatics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, and syntax to build an empirically based account of clitic doubling and right dislocation in contemporary Argentine, Mexican, and Peninsular Spanish. While these syntactic phenomena have been addressed in both theoretical (Chafe, Lambrecht, Suñer) and corpus studies (Silva-Corvalán, Weissenrieder), Belloro's approach builds upon prior research in two ways: 1) by considering data from three dialects in order to control for and document dialectical change; and 2) by arguing that cognitive accessibility drives the observed variation. While the book draws from Lambrecht's work on identifiability to provide a detailed taxonomy of doubling and right dislocation structures for both dative and accusative clitics, this review will focus on accusative clitic doubling, as this case provides a representative example of the empirical methods used, in addition to serving as the basis for the book's key theoretical claims. As many readers will already know, clitic doubling refers to sentences in which both clitic and referent are explicitly stated in the same clause. In Spanish, this is common with dative clitics, as in "Se lo di a Juan." Right dislocation, on the other hand, refers to cases in which both clitic and referent are explicit, but where the referent appears after the right bound of the clause containing the clitic, as in 'La llamaron enseguida a una enfermera.' Some readers will also be aware that accusative clitic doubling containing a full NP (e.g., "Lo empujé a mi hermano") is far more common in certain dialects than in others. According to the eight corpora used in the study, this structure represents just 14% of doubled constructions in Peninsular Spanish, but accounts for 63% in Mexican Spanish and fully 82% in Argentine Spanish. In order to account for this cross-dialectical variation, Belloro proposes that the three dialects represent different stages of grammaticalization of the clitic. Following Chafe, she argues that cognitive accessibility, or the degree of activation of the referent for the speaker, is the determining factor behind which form is produced. Belloro presents numerous examples suggesting that Argentine Spanish is not restricted to a dichotomous expression of topicality that selects either clitic or full NP; instead, this dialect offers speakers a third option in which both forms are present. In this case, the clitic indicates that the referent is topical while the NP serves to disambiguate it from other, more discourse-recent, potential referents. In this light, accusative doubling provides a syntactic construction that indexes an intermediate gradient of cognitive accessibility. [End Page 313] Because this study presents its arguments with corpus data and syntactic analysis, perhaps it is appropriate to applaud and critique it along those same two axes. Regarding the first, the use of ample empirical data that is representative of different dialects adds significant weight to Belloro's claims and helps to explain some of the discrepancies between previous studies on the subject. However, perhaps because Belloro explicitly criticizes the problems inherent with focusing on a single dialect, it quickly becomes clear that the Argentine corpus is at the center of the book, and that the Mexican and Peninsular data receive less attention. Although this may be justifiable on theoretical grounds because the phenomenon described above is most pronounced in the Argentine corpus, this focus on a single regional dialect draws attention to another fact about the study: of the eight corpora consulted, only one is from Argentina. Furthermore, it is titled "El habla culta de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires: materiales para su estudio," which suggests that it may not be representative of Argentine Spanish in general since it is restricted both geographically and socio-economically. While this does not mean that the corpus is flawed, it does introduce the possibility of bias in the study due to restriction of...

The phenomenon of clitic doubling is known to be especially interesting with respect to the Romance languages. As its name suggest, clitic doubling involves the doubling of a verbal argument by a clitic pronoun inside the same propositional structure. From a generative perspective it was initially investigated focusing on its properties as exhibited in those Romance languages where it is attested. Thus Jaeggli (1982) who was the first to notice its theoretical importance, describes it for River Plate Spanish (spoken in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). Over the years, different factors that make clitic doubling possible, likely or even obligatory have been studied. Grammatical factors such as e.g. pronominal vs. non-pronominal, accusative vs. dative, the occurrence vs. non-occurrence of different object marking together with semantic and pragmatic factors such as e.g. animacy, specificity or definiteness have been held responsible for the occurrence and distribution. This volume is a collection of papers given at the workshop “Clitic Doubling and the syntax/semantic interface in Romance DPs” held at the University of Hamburg in November 2014. The workshop was a joint event organized by NEREUS (Research Network for Referential Categories in Spanish and other Romance languages” and the DFG-project “Clitic Doubling across Romance”. The papers of this volume deal with different aspects of the clitic doubling construction and related issues, such as its semantic, pragmatic and morphosyntactic properties across the Romance languages and beyond, thereby contributing to the understanding of the nature of the cross-linguistic variation, as well as the micro-variation observed within.

Romanian, as well as certain varieties of Spanish (but not Iberian Spanish, French or Italian) allow the clitic doubling of direct objects (indirect objects will be left out here),1 a phenomenon that is subject to clear crosslinguistic differences: in Spanish, but not in Romanian, clitic doubling is blocked by contrastive Focus and quantificational features. Our analysis of this contrast will rely on the following theoretical ingredients: (i) (most cases of) Head-Movement will be analyzed in terms of Head to Head Merge (Dobrovie-Sorin 2000; Dobrovie-Sorin & Galves 2000); (ii) clitic placement will be analyzed as a Spec-Head agreement configuration with a null pronoun pro sitting in the Spec of (the complex head containing) the clitic (revised version of Sportiche 1996); (iii) clitic doubling will be analyzed as resulting from an interarboreal operation (Bobaljik & Brown 1997) that merges a complex head Cl+Vv+T(ense) with the vP containing the clitic doubled dp; (iv) the contrasts between Romanian and (River Plate) Spanish will be analyzed as being due to the fact that in Spanish, Spec,CP is distinct from Spec,Cl+Vv+T, whereas in Romanian, comp is part of the complex functional head clustering around T, and correlatively, Spec,C is not distinct from, but rather a slot inside the Spec of the complex head Comp+Cl+Vv+T.

Teodora Radeva-Bork. Single and double clitics in adult and child grammar. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012. [xvi] + 230 pp. Clitics have intrigued linguists for decades. By definition, they occupy an intermediate position between words and affixes (e.g., 's in English). They fulfill syntactic roles but do not carry stress and form a phonological unit with the preceding or following word. In Single and double clitics in adult and child grammar, Teodora Radeva-Bork presents fresh observations and new data on the topic. The main contribution of the work is empirical data on the acquisition of direct-object clitics and direct-object clitic doubling in Bulgarian. The book, however, makes important theoretical contributions to the understanding of these phenomena cross-linguistically. While the intended audience of the book is scholars of syntax and first-language acquisition, the book is accessible also to non-experts. Chapter 1 provides a useful overview of the book, chapter 2 goes into depth in the definition of clitics and the evolution of theoretical thinking about them, and chapter 7 presents a bullet-point summary of the main arguments and findings. Extensive cross-referencing within and between chapters also contributes to the clarity and coherence of the work. The core is clearly organized, presenting two pairs of a theory-focused chapter and an empirical chapter. The first pair (chapters 2 and 3) focuses on single clitics, and the second (chapters 4 and 5) on clitic doubling. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the definition of clitics, their spread, and the current theoretical landscape with respect to single clitics. Bulgarian has direct-object clitics, indirect-object clitics, and auxiliary clitics, but the book concentrates on direct-object clitics. The chapter develops the idea that Bulgarian direct-object clitics (clitics henceforth) are case markers (K heads) but that they also have agreement properties. Chapter 3 begins by shedding light on an intriguing pattern in the crosslinguistic data on the acquisition of clitics. In some languages Catalan, French, Italian, and European Portuguese) clitics emerge around age three and go through a stage during which children omit them. In other languages (Spanish, Romanian, Greek, and Croatian), children begin to produce clitics around age two and make few errors. Unlike other scholars, who have focused on explaining clitic acquisition in a single language (usually one showing a late emergence pattern), Radeva-Bork looks for an explanation of the cross-linguistic pattern. She suggests that the explanation can be found in the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998). On the basis of this constraint, she suggests that Bulgarian children should show early emergence of clitics, even though other recent data have suggested that this is not the case (Ivanov 2008). But Radeva-Bork supports her prediction with data from two elicited production studies with Bulgarian two- to four-year-old children, the data for which are extensively presented and discussed. The children show practically error-free use of the clitics, a pattern indistinguishable from adult performance. Clitic doubling refers to the doubling of a verbal argument by a weak pronoun (the clitic) within the same clause. Chapter 4 overviews the spread of this phenomenon (with a focus on the Balkans) and its current treatments. Radeva-Bork argues that, unlike in Romance languages where clitic doubling may result from left or right dislocation of an argument, in Bulgarian it is genuine clitic doubling. This is shown by the lack of a prosodic boundary between the clitic and its adjacent associate. The chapter also makes the case that there are three types of triggers of clitic doubling in Bulgarian: object marking (especially when non-SUBJ-first word order is used), topic marking, and accusative or dative experiencers (again conditioned by word order). (1) Previously research has emphasized semantic factors, and RadevaBork presents data suggesting that syntactic conditions and information structure are stronger constraints on clitic doubling in colloquial Bulgarian. …

Este artigo investiga a construção de redobro de clítico (RC) em português europeu (PE), que se caracteriza pela dupla expressão de um argumento através de um clítico e de um pronome forte. Em PE, esta construção manifesta-se obrigatoriamente em contextos discursivos e sintáticos em que o clítico, enquanto elemento átono e necessariamente adjacente a um hospedeiro verbal, não pode receber acento prosódico nem participar em construções que requerem autonomia morfossintática. O padrão altamente restritivo da configuração de redobro nesta língua opõe o PE a outras línguas românicas, como o espanhol ou o romeno, em que o RC pode manifestar-se opcionalmente com expressões nominais plenas. Neste trabalho, procuro explicar o contraste entre o RC em PE e noutras línguas propondo que à designação de RC correspondem duas construções distintas. Concretamente, defendo que em PE o clítico não é a manifestação do redobro de um argumento, como é tradicionalmente assumido nas análises para outras línguas, mas o próprio argumento redobrado. Na análise que apresento, clítico e pronome forte estão associados por movimento e a configuração de redobro resulta da produção das duas cópias da cadeia de movimento para satisfação de um requisito em PF. O RC em PE é, nesta perspetiva, um fenómeno de interface que envolve duas operações independentemente motivadas: o movimento sintático do clítico para cliticização ao hospedeiro verbal e a realização do pronome forte em PF para atribuição de acento prosódico.

This paper examines the little-known morphosyntactic variation involving Spanish psych verbs that take an experiencer IO and a stimulus subject. With these verbs, a dative clitic duplicating the IO is widely assumed to be obligatory in the canonical [IO-V-S] order (A la gente joven LE/*Ø gustan los deportes ‘Young people like sports’). However, naturally occurring data from corpora show that clitic doubling is not obligatory in the non canonical [S-V-IO] order, yielding two variant constructions (Los deportes LE/Ø gustan a la gente joven ‘Sports appeal to young people’). Using written corpus data from Peninsular Spanish, the paper investigates two issues: (a) what is the overall distribution of clitic doubling in [S-V-IO] psych verb sentences?; (b) are there any systematic distributional differences between the two variants? With respect to (a), we found that for none of the 10 psych verbs surveyed was clitic doubling obligatory. With respect to (b), we found the presence of a clitic tends to restrict the referential properties of the lexical IO in terms of animacy, pronominality, individuality, and number. The findings of this study indicate that dative clitics, which are commonly analyzed as IO-V agreement markers, actually make a substantive contribution to the semantics of psych verb sentences.