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Clitic doubling in Spanish

Agreement of the third kind

Abstract

The syntactic behavior of nouns is in part determined by their meaning; for example, nouns which refer to human beings usually have special syntactic properties. The basic distinction between human and non-human nouns is a psychological reality reflected in language specific properties of many languages. The question is how this difference is reflected and why the distinction surfaces the way it does. This is the basic issue that will be discussed in this contribution, by taking a look at a much discussed property of Spanish. In Spanish, the definite human direct objects can be doubled by a clitic pronoun in many dialects, and must be doubled if it is a strong, human pronoun. Definite human direct objects must be introduced by the preposition a in all variants, and can be doubled by a clitic in many variants. The question what makes human direct objects so special and which other properties can be found has been studied very much in different regions and dialects or variants. In this paper, attention will be given to the other side of the question: What blocks clitic doubling if the direct object is nonhuman? Since clitic doubling is a kind of agreement, the question is why and how clitic doubling is blocked with non-human objects.

Abstract

The syntactic behavior of nouns is in part determined by their meaning; for example, nouns which refer to human beings usually have special syntactic properties. The basic distinction between human and non-human nouns is a psychological reality reflected in language specific properties of many languages. The question is how this difference is reflected and why the distinction surfaces the way it does. This is the basic issue that will be discussed in this contribution, by taking a look at a much discussed property of Spanish. In Spanish, the definite human direct objects can be doubled by a clitic pronoun in many dialects, and must be doubled if it is a strong, human pronoun. Definite human direct objects must be introduced by the preposition a in all variants, and can be doubled by a clitic in many variants. The question what makes human direct objects so special and which other properties can be found has been studied very much in different regions and dialects or variants. In this paper, attention will be given to the other side of the question: What blocks clitic doubling if the direct object is nonhuman? Since clitic doubling is a kind of agreement, the question is why and how clitic doubling is blocked with non-human objects.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. The linguistics enterprise 1
  5. Scope ambiguities through the mirror 11
  6. Phonetic and phonological approaches to early word recognition 55
  7. Restructuring head and argument in West-Germanic 79
  8. Scope assignment in child language 99
  9. The learnability of A-bar chains 115
  10. Looking at anaphora 141
  11. Incremental discourse processing 167
  12. Theoretical validity and psychological reality of the grammatical code 183
  13. Monitoring for speech errors has different functions in inner and overt speech 213
  14. What’s in a quantifier? 235
  15. Minimal versus not so minimal pronouns 257
  16. Against partitioned readings of reciprocals 283
  17. The representation and processing of fixed and compositional expressions 291
  18. Clitic doubling in Spanish 315
  19. Metalinguistic processing and acquisition within the MOGUL framework 327
  20. Catching heffalumps 345
  21. Index 377
The Linguistics Enterprise
This chapter is in the book The Linguistics Enterprise
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.150.14sch

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. The linguistics enterprise 1
  5. Scope ambiguities through the mirror 11
  6. Phonetic and phonological approaches to early word recognition 55
  7. Restructuring head and argument in West-Germanic 79
  8. Scope assignment in child language 99
  9. The learnability of A-bar chains 115
  10. Looking at anaphora 141
  11. Incremental discourse processing 167
  12. Theoretical validity and psychological reality of the grammatical code 183
  13. Monitoring for speech errors has different functions in inner and overt speech 213
  14. What’s in a quantifier? 235
  15. Minimal versus not so minimal pronouns 257
  16. Against partitioned readings of reciprocals 283
  17. The representation and processing of fixed and compositional expressions 291
  18. Clitic doubling in Spanish 315
  19. Metalinguistic processing and acquisition within the MOGUL framework 327
  20. Catching heffalumps 345
  21. Index 377
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