Anti-repair effects under ellipsis: diagnosing (post)-syntactic clitics in Spanish

SAAB, ANDRÉS & PABLO ZDROJEWSKI

Workshop; Islands in Contemporary Sintactic Theory; 2011

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.