Clitic Doubling in a Doubling World

This chapter places Clitic Doubling in Argentinean Spanish into the broad perspective of pronominal doubling phenomena. A series of diagnostics is presented based on the interaction of Clitic Doubling with its PF/pragmatic effects, on the one hand, and its syntactic/LF effects, on the other. An important conclusion is that Clitic Doubling must be kept apart from Clitic Right Dislocation and Clitic Left Dislocation. Clitic Doubling is thus conceived of the morphological reflex of the abstract composition of object DPs; concretely, it is an A-dependency triggered whenever the object possesses a [person]-feature, an observation called the Person Feature Condition. So, under the minimal assumption that [3P] features can be optionally encoded on lexical DPs in Argentinean Spanish, but that it is only specified for pronouns in other Spanish dialects, variation facts associated with this phenomenon are explained. By the same token, the different behavior of doubled and nondoubled objects in several syntactic/LF configurations also follows.