Clitic Doubling in the Romance Languages

The phenomenon of clitic doubling is very widespread in different forms in the Romance languages. It can be defined as the double occurrence of the same constituent twice inside a single clausal unit; one of the two is represented by a clitic while the other has the properties of a whole phrase. It can target essentially all arguments of the verb and is often sensitive to the semantic/pragmatic properties (like definiteness/specificity, topicality, animacy) of the phrasal doublee so that XPs with these properties are more frequently doubled than XPs that do not have them, although there are languages in which doubling covers the whole spectrum of a given argument. A robust empirical generalization is that direct objects can be doubled only in languages that also double indirect objects, while there is no relation with subject clitic doubling.