Clitic Doubling across Romance

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susann Fischer
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237224735

The goal of this project is the comparative synchronic and diachronic analysis of clitic doubling of dative and accusative arguments in varieties of Catalan and Spanish. The project aims at contributing to a general theory of clitic doubling within the generative framework. Clitic doubling is understood as a phenomenon where a clitic pronoun co-occurs with a full nominal DP in the same sentence. Since the clitic pronoun and the full DP share one syntactic function, one case and one semantic role, clitics are especially interesting and pose a challenge for any linguistic theory. Over the years, many factors have been discussed and held responsible for the occurrence and distribution of clitic doubling: grammatical factors such as the categorical properties of DPs (pronominal vs. nominal), case (accusative vs. dative), the occurrence vs. non-occurrence of Differential Object Marking), semantic factors such as animacy, and pragmatic factors, such as specificity and definiteness. From this it follows that an explanation of clitic doubling has to refer to several modules of grammar, i.e. clitic doubling should be regarded as an interface phenomenon. We argue that the emergence of clitic doubling in the Romance languages is the result of the grammaticalization path of the clitic (from DP to D° to phi-features) interacting with the parameter responsible for verb-movement, i.e. the possibility of A-bar-movement in front of the verb by which the information structure of the sentence is changed. Furthermore, since clitics are located at the interfaces, we suggest that the spread from dative clitic doubling to accusative clitic doubling in contact varieties is a consequence of a language contact setting. Optional dative clitic doubling, which underlies semantic and pragmatic restrictions, is acquired late in first language acquisition and vulnerable to variation in bilingual, heritage- or L2 speakers. Thus, we propose that in contact varieties speakers have problems to identify when a nominal should be doubled and when not and therefore overgeneralize the pattern and extend it to accusative nominal as well.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants