| dc.description.abstract | The present study aims at looking into the clitic doubling, adopting for this, a generative approach. This phenomenon consists of the co-occurrence of the unstressed clitic pronoun adjoined to the verb with an accusative or dative DP in an internal argument position of a transitive verb. The crosslinguistic analysis has shown that the clitic doubling imposes restrictions to the syntatic-semantic nature of the noun phrase which will or will not be doubled. The morphosyntatic properties of the noun phrases that participate in the clitic doubling constructions show that the doubled object can not be a bare NP; it should, therefore, project a functional layer. Evidencing that the doubled object must make mention of an element previously given in the pragmatic-discourse context, it is proposed that, from the semantic point of view, the indirect or direct object DP must present the configurational features [[+REFERENTIAL][+SPECIFIC][+DEFINITE]]. The parametric variation that is observed in the constructions of clitic doubling among the languages is, therefore, sensitive to the presence, or not, of these features. The theoretical proposal that we assume is that the clitic that doubles a direct or indirect object DP is analyzed in this dissertation as copy of phi-features of the internal argument of the verb. In line with this intuition, clitics are viewed as an insertion of a post Spell-Out operation and does not participate either in the mechanisms of the Case feature evaluation or in the mechanisms of the thematic role assignment. | |
