The Presuppositionality Condition and Spanish Clitic-Doubled Objects

Franco, Jon; Mejías-Bikandi, Errapel

doi:10.1075/cilt.185.09fra

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, it is precisely in some of the non-standard varieties that the parallelism emerges strikingly. Franco and Mejías-Bikandi (1999) show that in Basque Country Spanish the condition for an indefinite object to be clitic-doubled is to receive a strong interpretation: in (29a) there is only a strong (presuppositional, in Franco and Mejías-Bikandi's terms) interpretation, imposed by clitic doubling, while in (29b), where the object is not doubled, the indefinite DP is ambiguous between a strong and a weak interpretation (notice that a is present in both cases). The subtle contrast in (29) confirms that explicit object morphology -clitic doubling is an instance of object agreement-usually forces strong interpretations in indefinites.…”

Section: Clitic Doubling and Scramblingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

Leonetti

2004

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174

130

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The use of the preposition a with direct objects in Spanish is a well known instance of the general phenomenon of Differential Object Marking (DOM). In Spanish grammars the insertion of a is usually presented as dependent on two basic factors: animacy and referentiality/specificity. The correlation between the object marker and specificity is not systematic, basically because animacy -and not specificity-is the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, but a number of facts still indicate that the presence of a tends to be associated with specific readings. In order to account for these facts without positing any [+specific] feature in the linguistic meaning of a, I try to show that it contributes to utterance interpretation as an internal topic marker. This seems to be the simplest way to derive «specificity effects», and to account for the crosslinguistic similarities between DOM and other grammatical phenomena (topicalization, clitic doubling, scrambling).Key words: specificity, animacy, topicality, object marking, inference. * I am grateful to the participants at the workshop «Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages» (Konstanz, October 2002) and to two anonymous reviewers of Catalan Journal of Linguistics for very useful and thought-provoking comments, as well as to Vicky Escandell-Vidal and Olga Fernández-Soriano for helpful discussion on an earlier draft. Thanks also to Begoña Vicente for patiently correcting my English. PreliminariesIt is well known that several languages use certain grammatical devices as object markers that are in some sense associated with the Specific / Non-Specific distinction. Spanish is one of them, and Romanian, Turkish, Persian or Hindi are frequently mentioned as other representative cases of the general phenomenon which, following Georg Bossong's proposal, we call Differential Object Marking (DOM) 1 . My aim in this paper will be that of determining what is the particular contribution of DOM to utterance interpretation in Spanish, and how specificity is related to it. I would like to begin by presenting some basic assumptions about the Semantics / Pragmatics interface and on the notion of specificity, in order to use them later in the analysis of the Spanish prepositional accusative. I intend to show that, although the correlation between the accusative marker and specificity is far from clear, basically because animacy -and not specificity-is the dominant trigger for DOM in Spanish, a number of facts still indicate that the prepositional accusative tends to be associated with specific readings, in a way which is not unrelated to what happens in scrambling and clitic doubling constructions. Far from deriving from some [+ specific] feature inherent in the meaning of a, such facts can be shown to be a consequence of a different basic semantic feature that should allow us to bring together most of the grammatical phenomena that are sensitive to specificity. Some closing remarks on specificity in grammatical structure will sum up the discussion.I wi...

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Section: Clitic Doubling and Scramblingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

Leonetti

2004

catjl

174

130

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“…As the feature [+human] implies countability, and gender is not represented morphologically in the dative clitic in the Basque leista dialect, we can conclude that Basque Spanish DOM is driven by animacy. Landa notes, however, that clitic doubling in Basque Spanish introduces a further condition: it requires that the doubled argument be interpreted as "presuppositional" (Franco 1993;Landa 1995;Franco and Mejias-Bikandi 1999). Franco and Mejias-Bikandi (1999) Franco and Mejias-Bikandi (1999) observe that whereas non-doubled indefinites can have either a specific or a non-specific reading (see also Leonetti 2012), clitic doubled indefinites can only have a specific one.…”

Section: Some Properties Of Spanish Basquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Landa notes, however, that clitic doubling in Basque Spanish introduces a further condition: it requires that the doubled argument be interpreted as "presuppositional" (Franco 1993;Landa 1995;Franco and Mejias-Bikandi 1999). Franco and Mejias-Bikandi (1999) Franco and Mejias-Bikandi (1999) observe that whereas non-doubled indefinites can have either a specific or a non-specific reading (see also Leonetti 2012), clitic doubled indefinites can only have a specific one. This reading, they argue, corresponds to the insertion of the variable introduced by the indefinite in the restriction of the event quantification, along the lines of Diesing's (1992) Mapping Hypothesis.…”

Section: Some Properties Of Spanish Basquementioning

confidence: 99%

A Note on Parameter Setting in Contact Situations

Etxepare

Gallego

2022

Languages

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This paper revisits the study of linguistic variation within the Government and Binding approach to parameters, pointing out some limitations of parameter schemata in language contact scenarios. Discussion is focused on the possibility that clustering effects (the schemata themselves) are more complex than conventional approaches suggest. We outline an alternative approach, directly connected to Uriagereka’s typology or parameters, which is itself based on Chomsky’s Theory of Formal Languages. Empirically, we focus on language contact situations, as they provide cases where variation by contact operates under what we call an Excess of Stimulus, whereby access to the relevant data is overwhelming, but somehow ignored by learners.

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Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Haegeman¹,

Jiménez-Fernández

Radford

2014

The Linguistic Review

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Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are inter esting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of sub ject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associ ated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint viola tions than others, which would account for widespread interspeaker judgment variability.

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The Presuppositionality Condition and Spanish Clitic-Doubled Objects

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

Specificity and Differential Object Marking in Spanish

A Note on Parameter Setting in Contact Situations

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

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