Spanish and pro-drop

[Fernando Zuniga]

I have been following the recent discussions about pro-drop and parts of
speech with great interest. In this context and as an introduction, I would
like to quote from Alan King's seminal posting dated May, 5th: 

QUOTE
It is my understanding that, if we are going to talk about "pro-drop",
this term must be limited by definition in the way I just did in such 
a way as to refer to overt NP arguments. (The fact that it is often 
understood to refer just to *subject* arguments is another giveaway 
revealing the Anglocentric thinking that conceived it; we can just as 
easily talk about object pro-drop, and other types too. But in this 
message I am going to assume that Leon intended the question to refer 
to subject pro-drop.)
UNQUOTE

Present-day Spanish is far from being a homogeneous phenomenon, as any
specialist can corroborate. In particular, although there is not much
variation (at least to my knowledge) as to _subject pro-drop_, there *is* what
I think might be important variation as to _object pro-drop_. Consider the
following data:

(1) Stardard American Spanish and non-standard varieties known to me
    a.  Le presté el libro.
        'I lent him/her the book.'
    b.  Le presté el libro al estudiante.
    c.  *Presté el libro al estudiante.
        'I lent the book to the student.'

These data show that the _le_ indirect object marker for 3s (usually analyzed
as _pronoun_, but recently also as clitic) is not less obligatory than the
_-é_ portmanteau coding 1s subject, mode and tense (customarily analyzed as
suffixal index). This is the result of a diachronic development - not too long
ago, sentence (1c) would have been grammatical.

(2) Standard American Spanish
    a. Lo vi.
       'I saw him.'
    b. Vi a Jon.
    c. (*)Lo vi a Jon.
       'I saw Jon.'
    Argentinian Spanish (at least some registers / dialects)
    d.  Lo vi a Jon.
       'I saw Jon.'

The _lo_ direct object marker for 3sm, which in most American Spanish
varieties has remained "uncontaminated by the notorious _le/lo_ confusion" (as
someone put it), is in complementary distribution with a lexical NP in the
standard variety - unless (2c) is to be understood eg with focus (as a
felicitous answer to the question _Did you really see Jon?_, but *not* as a
felicitous answer to the question _Who did you see?_), in which case the
'double marking' is grammatical (this explains the * in brackets here).
However, some varieties of Argentinian Spanish grant the direct object clitic
(as far as I have been told, only for 3rd person) the same obligatory status
as the indirect object clitic, or are fairly advanced on their way to do so.

My question is: Could this prove an interesting typological parameter as well?
Although I am not a specialist (please correct me if I am wrong), I see this
particular phenomenon merely as part of a long run drift in Spanish and
perhaps in (some?) Romance languages in general, including the following:

i) word order shift (verb-final to verb-initial)
ii) pronominal cliticization (and possibly, in Jelinek's terms, from
[-pronominal arguments] to [+pronominal arguments])
iii) verbal complex restructuring (admittedly with great variation among the
different Romance languages)

As to iii) above, consider that the only forms admitting pronominal _suffixes_
instead of proclitics in present-day Spanish are the nonfinite forms
(infinitive and gerund) and the imperative. While there used to be enclitics,
those have been restricted to the case where (notably) the subject marker is
absent (an therefore, one might argue, the first postroot position is not
blocked) and to the arguably marginal imperative, although this is an
important case I cannot account for. Consider the beautiful matrix-coding data
in (3):

(3) a. Quiero [decírselo].
    b. [Se lo quiero] decir.
    c. *[Quiéroselo] decir.
    d. *Quiero [se lo decir].
       'I want to tell it to him/her.'

Can anyone provide any help or comments on these issues as related to the
pro-drop continuum or to the set A / set B distinction proposed by DNS Bhat?

Fernando Zuniga

General Linguistics Department
University of Zurich

Plattenstr. 54
8032 Zurich
Switzerland

Tel +41 1 6342185
Fax +41 1 6344357
Mail Fernando.Zuniga at access.unizh.ch

____________________________________________________________________
Get your own FREE, personal Netscape WebMail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com.