Decomposing Spanish dative clitics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7557/1.10.2.6217Keywords:
dative clitics, applicative, agreement, definiteness, le-for-lesAbstract
In Spanish, dative clitics have standardly been analyzed differently from accusative ones. The apparent different constraints that regulate each of these clitic doubling constructions have been at the base of the differing analyses. In this paper, we will argue that in spite of the alleged differences, clitic doubling in Spanish (both accusative and dative) has more in common than meets the eye. In light of a generally neglected structure in which Spanish dative clitics may not show agreement with their plural double (a.k.a. le-for-les), we will argue for a decompositional analysis of Spanish dative clitics. For us, dative clitics instantiate an applicative (Cuervo 2003, a.o.) morpheme which may be combined with a Dº head (Uriagereka 1995). This analysis will allow us not only to explain the le-for-les phenomenon observed, accounting for its distribution and syntactic licensing, but also the definiteness interpretation that an agreeing dative clitic is subject to, in turn providing a uniform account for the parallelisms between accusative (i.e., purely Dº) and dative (i.e., Applicative + optional Dº) clitic doubling. Finally, certain contexts in which les surfaces and that fail to be accounted for under our proposal are provided an account in terms of “harmonic agreement,” while still keeping the analysis proposed to account for both new and old data and observations.
References
Ausín, A. & F. J. Fernández-Rubiera (2017). Laísmo and ‘le-for-les’: To agree or not to agree, in S. Perpiñán, D. Heap, I. Moreno-Villamar & A. Soto-Corominas (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11. Selected papers from the 44th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 101-126. Available at https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.05aus DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.05aus
Ausín, A. & F. J. Fernández-Rubiera. (2021). Leísmo: One le or two? in J. J. Colomina-Almiñana & S. Sessarego (eds.), Patterns in Spanish Structure, Context and Development. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 122-143. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003091790-8
Ausín, A. & F. J. Fernández-Rubiera. (to appear). Towards a uniform account of accusative and dative clitic doubling in Spanish, in C. Howe, P. Chamorro, T. Gupton & M. Renwick (eds.), Theory, data, and practice: Selected papers from the 49th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Language (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 1). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Baker, M. (1988). Theta theory and the syntax of applicatives in Chichewa. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, pp. 353-389. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133903 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133903
Belloro, V. (2007). Spanish Clitic Doubling: A Study of the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of New York at Buffalo.
Boeckx, C. & Y. Jeong. (2004). The fine structure of intervention in syntax, in C. Kwon & W. Lee (eds.), Issues in Current Linguistic Theory: A Festschrift for Hong Bae Lee. Seoul, Kyungchin, pp. 83-116.
Bosque, I. (1996). Por qué determinados sustantivos no son sustantivos determinados, in I. Bosque (ed.), El sustantivo sin determinación. La ausencia de determinante en la lengua española. Madrid, Visor libros, pp. 13–120.
Bosque, I. & J. Gutiérrez-Rexach. (2009). Fundamentos de sintaxis formal. Madrid, Ediciones Akal.
Casares, J. (1918). Crítica efímera. Madrid, Saturnino Calleja S.A.
Citko, B. (2011). Small Clauses. Lang. Linguistics Compass 5/10, pp. 748–763. Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00312.x DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00312.x
Cuervo, R. J. (1885). Apuntaciones críticas sobre el lenguaje bogotano. Chartres, Impr. De Durand.
Cuervo, M. C. (2003). Datives at large. Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT.
Cuervo, M. C. (2010). Against ditransitivity. Probus 22/2, pp. 151-180. Available at https://doi.org/10.1515/prbs.2010.006 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/prbs.2010.006
DeMello, G. (1992). Le for les in the spoken educated Spanish of eleven cities. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 37/4, pp. 407-430. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100022027
DiTullio, A., A. Saab & P. Zdrojewski. (2019). Clitic Doubling in a Doubling World: The Case of Argentinean Spanish Reconsidered, in A. Gallego (ed.), The Syntactic Variation of Spanish Dialects. Oxford, OUP, pp. 215-244. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190634797.003.0008 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190634797.003.0008
Fernández-Soriano, O. (1989). Rección y ligamiento en español: aspectos del parámetro de sujeto nulo. Ph.D. Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain).
Fernández-Soriano, O. (1999). El pronombre personal: Formas y distribuciones. Pronombres átonos y tónicos, in I. Bosque & V. Demonte (dirs.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 1: 1209-1274. Madrid, Espasa.
Franco, J. (2001). On the doubling of overt operators, in J. Gutiérrez-Rexach & L. Silva-Villar (eds.), Current Issues in Spanish Syntax and Semantics. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 85-106. Available at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110850536.85
Freeze, R. (1992). Existentials and other locatives. Language 58, pp. 553-595. Available at https://doi.org/10.2307/415794 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/415794
Gallego, A. & J. Uriagereka. (2016). Estar = Ser + X. Borealis 5/1, pp. 123-156. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/1.5.1.3634 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/1.5.1.3634
Guajardo, G. (2020). Defective agreement in Spanish dative clitic-doubling: A cross-dialectal study of morphosyntactic variation. Ms., The Arctic University of Norway. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340166960_Defective_Agreement_in_Spanish_Dative_Clitic-Doubling_A_Cross-Dialectal_Study_of_Morphosyntactic_Variation
Gutiérrez-Rexach, J. (1999). The Formal Semantics of Clitic Doubling. Journal of Semantics 16/4, pp. 315-380. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/16.4.315
Huang, C.-T. J. (1982). Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Huerta Flores, N. (2005). Gramaticalización y concordancia objetiva en el español: Despronominalización del clítico dativo plural. Verba 32, pp. 165-190.
Hurtado, A. (1984). Clitic chains. Unpublished ms., Simon Fraser.
Jaeggli, O. (1982). Topics in Romance Syntax. Dordrecht, Foris Publications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112420225
Kany, C. (1945). Spanish-American Syntax. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Kayne, R. (1975). French Syntax. The Transformational Cycle. Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press.
Kayne, R. (1993). Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection. Studia Linguistica 47/1, pp. 3-31. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9582.1993.tb00837.x DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9582.1993.tb00837.x
Kramer, R. (2014). Clitic doubling or object agreement: the view from Amharic. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32/2, pp. 593-634. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9233-0 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9233-0
Laca, B. (1997). Sustantivos sin determinantes, función sintáctica y estructura informativa del enunciado en español, in R. Lorenzo (ed.), Actas do XIX congreso internacional de lingüística e filoloxía románicas, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1989, vol. 1: 495-510. A Coruña, Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza.
Laca, B. (1999). Presencia y ausencia de determinante, in I. Bosque & V. Demonte (dirs.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 1: 891-928. Madrid, Espasa.
Leonetti, M. (2008). Specificity in Clitic Doubling and in Differential Object Marking. Probus 20, pp. 33-66. Available at https://doi.org/10.1515/PROBUS.2008.002 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/PROBUS.2008.002
Maldonado, M. (2020). Plural Marking and D-Linking in Spanish Interrogatives. Journal of Semantics 37/1, pp. 145–170. Available at https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz024
Marantz, A. (1993). Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions. In Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Grammar, by S. Mchombo (ed.). Stanford (CA), CSLI Publications, pp. 113-150.
Marín, M. (1978). Estudios sobre el pronombre. Madrid, Gredos.
Martin, F. (2012). Deconstructing Catalan objects. Ph.D. Dissertation, NYU.
Martin, T. & C. Boeckx. (2013). El clític datiu és més que un clític. Lleida (Spain): Pagès editors.
Masullo, P. (1992). Incorporation and case theory in Spanish: A crosslinguistic perspective. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Washington.
McGinnis, M. (1998). Locality in A-movement. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT.
Ngoyani, D. (1996). The morphosyntax of applicatives. Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA.
Ordóñez, F. & E. Treviño (2016). Agreement and DOM with Impersonal Se. In The Morphosyntax of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America, by M. A. Kato & F. Ordóñez (eds.). Oxford, OUP, pp. 236–258. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190465889.003.0010
Ormazabal, J. & J. Romero. (2013). Object clitics, agreement and dialectal variation. Probus 25/2, pp. 301-344. Available at https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0012 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0012
Ormazabal, J. & J. Romero. (2020). Deconstructing SE constructions: number agreement and post-syntactic variation. Unpublished ms., available at http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.32704.89607
Pineda, A. (2018). Li-per-els[i] o la despronominalització del clític datiu en català: un fenomen incipient. Quaderns de Filologia: Estudis Lingüístics XXIII, pp. 247-281. Available at https://doi.org/10.7203/qf.23.13530 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7203/qf.23.13530
Pineda, A. (2019). From dative to accusative: An ongoing syntactic change in Romance. Probus 32/1, pp. 129-173. Available at https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2019-0001 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2019-0001
Pineda, A. (2020). Double object constructions in Romance: The common denominator. Syntax 23/3, pp. 203-240. Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/synt.12193 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/synt.12193
Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Introducing arguments. Cambridge (MA), MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262162548.001.0001
RAE. (1885). Gramática de la lengua castellana. Madrid, G. Hernando.
RAE & AALE. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid, Espasa.
Rinni, J. (1988). A new perspective on the origin of le for les. Journal of Hispanic Philology 12/3, pp. 207-219.
Rivas, A. (1977). A Theory of Clitics. Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT.
Roca, F. (1992). Object clitics in Spanish and Catalan. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 2, pp. 245-280.
Roca, F. (1996). Morfemas objetivos y determinantes: Los clíticos en español. Verba 23, pp. 83-119.
Soler Arechalde, M. A. (1992). Le/les > le con duplicación de objeto y sin ella. Estudios de lingüística aplicada 15-16, pp. 57-68.
Soto, G., S. Sadowsky & R. Martínez. (2014). El le invariable en el español escrito de Chile. Literatura y lingüística 29, pp. 225-248. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0716-58112014000100013 DOI: https://doi.org/10.29344/0717621X.29.90
Strozer, J. (1976). Clitics in Spanish. Ph.D. Dissertation, UCLA.
Sturgis, C. (1927). Uso de le por les. Hispania 10/4, pp. 251-254. Available at https://doi.org/10.2307/331165 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/331165
Suñer, M. (1988). The role of agreement in clitic-doubled constructions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6/3, pp. 391-434. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133904 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133904
Uriagereka, J. (1995a). Some Aspects of the Syntax of Clitic Placement in Western Romance. Linguistic Inquiry 26/1, pp. 79-123. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178889
Uriagereka, J. (1996). Determiner Clitic Placement. In R. Freidin (ed.), Current Issues in Comparative Grammar. Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 257-295. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0135-3_13 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0135-3_13
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Adolfo Ausin, Francisco Fernández-Rubiera
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
