On the pronominal origins of probes. A new look at the clitic doubling parameter revisited.

SAAB, ANDRÉS

Conferencia; CUNY Linguistics Colloquium Series; 2021

City University of New York

Among the myriads of Spanish varieties, Rioplatense Spanish is well-known for having an extended pattern of clitic doubling, both for accusative and dative arguments. Building on Sportiche?s theory of clitics and van Urk?s featural approach to A-movement, I propose that doubling clitics, which evolved from plain pronouns, are probes, i.e., pure syntactic indexes triggering Agree + A-movement. I show that this thesis is robustly confirmed by old and new toolsfor diagnosing A-movement (reconstruction, WCO, binding, ellipsis, agreement and so on). At LF the index is read off as a mere stranded λ-abstractor triggering predicate abstraction. The abstracted predicate is, then, semantically saturated by the doubled object. If the theory turns out to be correct, then clitic doubling could be conceived of as a new window to look into the birth and evolution of a subset of syntactic probes related to the so-called (and still mysterious) EPP property.