Clitic Doubling in a Doubling World:The Case of Argentinean Spanish Reconsidered

Abstract

In this chapter, we put Clitic Doubling (CD) into the broad perspective of pronominal doubling phenomena in Spanish. As a first step, in section 2, we describe some properties of this dialect that are relevant to the phenomena under study. Then, in section 3, we present a battery of diagnostics based on the interaction between CD and its prosodic/pragmatic effects, which let us demonstrate, against the current consensus, that Jaeggli?s (1982) observation regarding the dependency of CD on Differential Object Marking (DOM) i.e. Kayne's Generalization? holds in Argentinean Spanish. In addition, we provide a series of diagnostics concerning the interaction between CD and its syntactic/LF effects (Section 4). These diagnostics lead us to conclude that accusative CD is substantially different from both Clitic-Right Dislocation (CLRD) and Clitic-Left Dislocation (CLLD). In section 5, we present a novel analysis of CD that integrates the morphological effects of the phenomenon with its indubitable syntactic/LF effects. We claim that CD in general Spanish is the morphological reflex of the abstract composition of direct objects. Concretely, CD is obligatorily induced whenever the object possesses a [person] feature. We call this observation the Person Feature Condition and show that it has far reaching empirical and theoretical consequences. As we will see, the intricacies of CD in Argentinean Spanish fall in place under the minimal assumption that lexical DPs can optionally encode a [3person] feature, which in other Spanish varieties, as in standard European leísmo, is only active on pronouns. This minimal difference will be enough to explain a complex set of interactions between doubled and non-doubled DPs in several syntactic/LF configurations. In this respect, we endorse the view that linguistic change should be mainly attributed to the way in which syntax manipulates the set of formal features that UG provides (Chomsky-Borer's conjecture).