A Probabilistic and Syntactic Account of Variable Clitic Agreement in Spanish Double Object Constructions.

ABSTRACT: In Spanish clitic-doubling constructions, the clitic should agree in number with its coreferential doubled noun phrase. However, the present corpus analysis with data from 21 Spanish varieties reveals that, under certain structural configurations, number agreement is not always realized on the third-person dative clitic. In fact, the data shows that non-agreement appears to be the norm when the indirect object is a lexical noun phrase (77 vs. 23%). In this paper, I investigate two possible explanations for this phenomenon: (i) a processing account via an attraction effect and (ii) a syntactic account based on intervention effects. These two hypotheses make clear and testable predictions that I examine by means of conditional inference trees and Bayesian generalized mixed-effects log

SUBMITTER: Guajardo G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9321634 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature