(Non)-local verbal doubling in Spanish and Portuguese

SAAB, ANDRÉS

Conferencia; Romance Lab; 2011

Recent research on verbal doubling across languages (Nunes 2004, Martins 2007, Kandybowicz 2009, Biberauer 2009, among others) show that this phenomenon is a fruitful domain for making conjectures about the general architecture of the grammar, especially, with respect to the nature of copying phenomena and the way in which they interact with syntax and morphology. Two related questions are in the focus of this research line: (Q1) On the basis of which empirical evidence can we conclude that a given doubling phenomenon is the result of copying the same syntactic object or not? (Q2) Under which conditions does copy pronunciation arise as a grammatical option? In this work, I address both questions in the empirical domain of verbal doubling in Spanish and other Romance languages (in particular, European Portuguese).