Spanish clitic doubling and levels of grammatical relations

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of clitic doubling in Spanish, in particular, the conditions under which doubling of dative clitics is obligatory. Several descriptively distinct cases in which doubling is obligatory can be unified under a single general rule. This analysis depends crucially on the ability to refer to deep grammatical relations which are distinct from semantic roles. A comparison is made between Relational Grammar, an example of a theory which allows more than one level of syntactic grammatical relations, and Functional Grammar, an example of a theoretical framework which posits only one syntactic level. This comparison shows that the rule is more complicated in a framework like Functional Grammar. Thus clitic doubling in Spanish provides an argument in favor of positing at least two levels of grammatical relations distinct from semantics.