Nominalmorphology and semantics - Where's gender (and 'partitive articles') in Gallo-Romance?

Abstract

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.