Romance languages do not have double objects: evidence from European Portuguese and Spanish

Abstract

This paper focuses on the dative expression in Romance languages, particularly on European Portuguese (EP) and Spanish. Many authors have proposed that clitic(-doubling) constructions and nonclitic(-doubling) constructions in these languages share the same properties of both English double object construction (DOC) and ditransitive prepositional construction (DPC) (e.g. Masullo 1992, Demonte 1994, 1995, Romero 1997, Cuervo 2003, Morais 2006, 2012). Others, such as Pineda (2013), argue that the only strategy available in Romance to express the dative is the DOC. We will argue against these two proposals, showing that the same arguments presented in the literature to claim the occurrence of DOC in Romance languages, namely, binding asymmetries, passivization, clitic-doubling as well as lexical-semantic constraints, can instead be used as arguments to support that EP and Spanish only exhibit a DPC. In addition, we set apart from analyses of the dative as an applied argument, such those following Pylkkänen (2002). Furthermore, we will propose that, if some comparison can be established between Romance and English dative strategies, this should be based on the distinction between a DPC introduced by a functional preposition and a DPC introduced by a directional preposition. In fact, DPC from EP is “similar” to the one that occurs in English with core dative verbs, such as give: in both languages, the preposition a/to acts as a Case marker (e.g. Larson 1988; Rappaport-Hovav & Levin 2008).