Syntactically inert clitics: a paradox involving clitic doubling and its resolution

SAAB, ANDRÉS & PABLO ZDROJEWSKI

Campos do Jordão

Workshop; Romania Nova IV; 2010

It is a long standing assumption about Clitic Doubling (CD) constructions that clitics are syntactically active objects. Although many approaches debate on the status of clitics as agreement markers or as bona fide pronouns (Jaeggli 1986, Sportiche 1996, Uriagereka 1995, among others), their presence in syntactic derivations did not arise as an issue (with the exception of Depiante 2004 and Zdrojewski 2008). In this paper, we present some new facts regarding extraction (focus fronting), ellipsis, and CD in River Plate Spanish that show that some doubled clitics have to be analyzed as dissociated morphemes in Embick & Noyer’s (2001)sense.