Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach

Abstract

This article discusses three variable coding properties of Spanish objects: flagging (a-marking vs. ø-marking), indexing (clitic doubling vs. no doubling), and clitic case form (accusative lo vs. dative le). These properties are essential for the formal identification of grammatical relations. They are triggered by similar parameters that partly overlap and partly show distinct distributions, yet they also challenge the boundaries between direct objects [DO] and indirect objects [IO] and raise the question whether the typological alignment of Spanish (di)transitive clauses is indirective or secundative. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative corpus data on formal, semantic, and discourse properties of core participants in Spanish clauses, relating these properties to the distribution of variable coding. It is concluded that a-marking, clitic doubling, and leísmo are less frequently employed than unmarked objects, no doubling, and accusative case for clitics, that Spanish DO and IO must be taken as extreme points of a more general Object syntactic function, and that, in general, all variable object coding follows an indirective alignment type. Consequently, animate and topical objects are considered as formally and functionally marked atypical objects both in monotransitive and ditransitive clauses.

The participants as objects: Variation And Meaning Of First‐ And Second‐Person Object Encoding In Spanish

“…As concluded by García‐Miguel (:235), in Spanish “[t]he ‘canonical’ object is a postverbal phrase not marked by a preposition and not indexed in the verb”. Throughout the preceding analysis it has been possible to observe that Spanish first‐ and second‐person objects, having the direct participants as their referents, hardly conform to those prototypical formal and functional patterns.…”

“…The canonical clause cited above is characterized by the very contrast of salience between its two central participants (Comrie :128), the subject having the highest degree of salience and the object the lowest one. However, objects in Spanish show a good deal of functional and semantic variation in two‐participant clauses (García‐Miguel :243–245). They can approach either the prototype of accusative/direct object, which would correspond to the canonical object just described, or else a different functional prototype, that of dative/indirect object.…”

“…In other words, the elements placed higher on salience hierarchies have a stronger tendency to be morphologically indexed in the verbal nuclei of clauses, as well as to impose their morphological marks on other elements (Siewierska :43). In Spanish, the capability of establishing agreement is the main characterizing trait of central syntactic functions as against peripheral ones (García‐Miguel :207), signalling those referents that are perceived as the basic participants in an event described by means of a clause. Such central functions correspond to the prototypes usually labelled as subject, accusative/direct object, and dative/indirect object.…”

“…In the latter contexts, agreement correlates with syntactic function, being generally much easier with dative objects (5) than accusative ones (6a). Referent features such as definiteness and animacy are further conditioning factors: agreement seems impossible when the object los niños ‘the children’ is deprived of the definite article (6b), and is altogether less frequent with inanimate referents than with animate ones (see García‐Miguel :221ff; Melis & Flores ; Vázquez & García for further details on the variable formulation of clitics)…”

Managing subjectivity: Omission and expression of first-person singular object a mí in Spanish media discourse

“…Person object agreement is made through clitics, that is, the grammaticalization of Latin pronouns that signal the person and number of referents. What has been traditionally called object duplication or object clitic doubling is now referred to as object agreement or object indexing (García-Miguel 2015: 207, Haspelmath 2013).…”