Clitic doubling in HPSG or related frameworks

[Raúl Aranovich <aranovch@sprynet.com> at mindspring.com]

I am interested in references or suggestions about the treatment of clitic
doubling in unification-based frameworks. Recent work on pronominal clitics
in Romance (Miller & Sag 1997, Monachesi 1999) has focused on clitics as
arguments of the verb (i.e. as affixal NPs that satisfy the
subcategorization requirements of the verb), which may be OK for French or
Italian but runs into problems when applied to clitic doubling languages
like Spanish (also in some Filipino languages). In Spanish, for instance,
indirect objects are normally doubled by a dative clitic, as in the
following example:

Lupe le(i) dio  un dulce al     niño(i).
Lupe DAT   gave a  sweet to-the child
`Lupe gave a piece of candy to the child'.

If the dative clitic _le_ corresponds to a non-canonical member of the
SUBCAT list of the verb _dar_, then the NP _el niño_ is not licensed by the
subcategorization frame of the verb. 

A hypothesis I am considering is to say that the NP _el niño_ is not a
syntactic dependent of the verb, but rather a peripheral element licensed
through agreement with the clitic _le_, which is the true realization of the
indirect object. The basis for this idea comes from the fact that in
Standard Spanish (although not in my dialect) direct objects are doubled
only when topicalized, as in the following sentence:

Al niño(i)   lo(i) curó  Lupe.
To-the child ACC   cured Lupe
`Lupe cured the child'. 

The insight is that in order to avoid having two NPs (one canonical, the
other one not) competing for the same slot in the SUBCAT list, the full NP
corresponds to an atribute indicating TOPIC, or RHEME, or other discourse
functions associated with the sentence. In this way, many of the discourse
effects noticed on word order in Spanish can also be accounted for. I would
greatly appreciate any comments, suggestions, or criticism of this ideas by
the members of the list, as well as bibliographic references.

-Raul Aranovich 


                |-------------------------------------|
                |           Raúl Aranovich            |
                |    Division of Foreign Languages    |
                |  Univesity of Texas at San Antonio  |
                |     aranovch at lonestar.utsa.edu      |
                |-------------------------------------|