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Spanish Clitic Doubling: a Study of the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface

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Spanish Clitic Doubling: a Study of the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface Spanish Clitic Doubling: A Study of the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface by Valeria A. Belloro October 26, 2007 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the State University of New York at Buffalo in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics Copyright by Valeria Andrea Belloro 2007 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank first and foremost my thesis director, Dr. Robert Van Valin, and the members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Jean-Pierre Koenig and Dr. David Zubin. They all were extremely generous with their time and insights, and I am most grateful to them for their constant guidance and support. It would be difficult to find an academic environment where intellectual rigor and collegiality are combined as well as they are in the Linguistics Department at Buffalo. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to study there. While working on this dissertation, I presented my ongoing work at several Role and Reference Grammar Conferences whose participants provided me with many significant observations. I would like to especially thank Delia Bentley, Lilián Guerero, Mitsuaki Shimojo, Rolf Kailuweit and Carlos González Vergara. I also benefited from the comments and camaraderie of my fellow graduate students at the Linguistics Department, in particular Rodrigo Romero and Carolyn O’Meara. Most of the writing process took place at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I am very thankful for the generous welcome I received there. I benefited greatly from discussions with the linguists I had to opportunity to meet in México. I am particularly grateful to Ricardo Maldonado, Cecilia Rojas, Enrique Palancar, Sergio Ibáñez, Armando Mora, and Sergio Bogard, who generously shared with me their careful observations and directed me to relevant literature. iii I want to thank Brook Lillehaugen, Keturah Erhardt and Carolyn O’Meara, who helped with the editing of this dissertation, and the staff at the Lockwood Library, specially Jean E. Dickson and Jill Ortner, for their exceptional service. Different stages of my doctoral studies at Buffalo were partially funded by the Fulbright Commission, Fundación Antorchas, the P.E.O International Peace Scholarship Fund, the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International and the Mark Diamond Research Fund. To all these institutions, my sincere appreciation. This dissertation is dedicated to R.G. and V.G. iv Contents Acknowledgements......................................................................................................iii Contents ........................................................................................................................v List of Figures............................................................................................................. ix List of Tables............................................................................................................... xi Abbreviations............................................................................................................. xii Abbreviations............................................................................................................. xii Abstract......................................................................................................................xiv 1 Introduction .............................................................................................1 1.1. Overview: Doubling vs. Dislocation........................................................................ 5 1.2. The Grammatical Status of Pronominal Clitics........................................................ 9 1.3. Asymmetries on Indirect vs. Direct Object Doubling............................................ 14 1.4. A Note on Dialectal Variation................................................................................ 16 2 Previous Studies.....................................................................................19 2.1. Clitic Doubling in Generative Grammar................................................................ 19 2.1.1. Specificity Restrictions.................................................................................... 23 2.1.2. The Presuppositionality Condition.................................................................. 27 2.1.3. Summary and Discussion ................................................................................ 34 2.2. Discourse-Based Approaches................................................................................. 36 2.2.1. Barrenechea and Orecchia (1977) ................................................................... 36 2.2.2. Silva-Corvalán (1981) ..................................................................................... 39 v 2.2.3. Weissenrieder (1995)....................................................................................... 43 2.2.4. Colantoni (2002).............................................................................................. 45 2.2.5. Summary and Discussion ................................................................................ 47 3 ‘Doubling’ in Other Languages ...........................................................49 3.1. Romance languages................................................................................................ 51 3.1.1. Clitic doubling in other Spanish dialects......................................................... 51 3.1.2. Romanian......................................................................................................... 59 3.1.3. French and Italian............................................................................................ 61 3.2. Balkan and Slavic languages.................................................................................. 63 3.2.1. Albanian and Greek......................................................................................... 63 3.2.2. Macedonian and Bulgarian.............................................................................. 65 3.3. Bantu languages ..................................................................................................... 67 3.4. Other languages...................................................................................................... 69 3.5. Summary and Discussion....................................................................................... 70 4 Accusative Doubling in Buenos Aires Spanish...................................72 4.1. Methodology .......................................................................................................... 72 4.2. A-marking and Animacy........................................................................................ 74 4.3. Specificity............................................................................................................... 79 4.3.1. Specificity contrasts......................................................................................... 79 4.3.2. Evaluating the Specificity hypothesis ............................................................. 92 4.4. Presuppositionality............................................................................................... 100 vi 4.5. Definiteness.......................................................................................................... 104 4.6. Identifiability........................................................................................................ 109 4.6.1. Frame-linked Doubling ................................................................................. 116 4.6.2. Cognitive Accessibility ................................................................................. 126 4.7. Summary and Discussion..................................................................................... 131 5 Dative Doubling in Buenos Aires Spanish ....................................... 136 5.1. Initial Characterization......................................................................................... 136 5.2. Dative Doubling and Information Status ............................................................. 139 5.3. Comparing Dative and Accusative Doubling....................................................... 146 5.4. Summary and Discussion..................................................................................... 150 6 Clitic Doubling in Role and Reference Grammar........................... 154 6.1. Presentation of the model..................................................................................... 154 6.1.1. The Layered Structure of the Clause............................................................. 156 6.1.2. The Semantic Representation........................................................................ 160 6.1.3. The Pragmatic Structure................................................................................ 165 6.2. An RRG analysis of Spanish clitic doubling........................................................ 177 6.2.1. The Clausal Structure of Clitic Doubling Constructions............................... 177 6.2.2. Semantic Representation and Linking Rules................................................. 186 6.2.3. A brief note on “incorporated” datives.......................................................... 200 6.3. Summary and Discussion..................................................................................... 208 vii 7 Conclusions ........................................................................................
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