Clitic doubling or object agreement: the view from Amharic
نویسندگان
چکیده
Object agreement is the realization of phi features on v, whereas clitic doubling is often analyzed as the movement of a D head in order to attach to a verb. In principle, these two phenomena are distinct, but in practice they can be difficult to distinguish. In this paper, I take up the issue for the Amharic object marker, a morpheme that co-varies with the phi features of an internal argument. Evidence from its distribution and morphological form indicate that it is a doubled clitic, but it also displays a handful of properties characteristic of agreement. Building on some of the most recent clitic doubling research, I develop an Agree-based clitic doubling analysis of the object marker that accounts for both its doubled clitic-like and agreement-like properties. Overall, the paper is a case study in how to distinguish clitic doubling and agreement in a particular language, and an investigation of how to capture the relationship between these two deeply similar phenomena in linguistic theory.
منابع مشابه
Doubling Clitics are Pronouns: Reduce and Interpret
Controversy has plagued the question of whether verbal “object markers” (OMs) are object pronouns cliticized to the verb or realizations of object agreement. Beginning with data from Amharic, we develop a reliable and consistent diagnostic for resolving this question. Specifically, we claim that OMs should be analyzed as clitic pronouns if and only if they are unable to double nominals that are...
متن کاملThe Acquisition of Clitic Objects in Modern Greek: Single Clitics, Clitic Doubling, Clitic Left Dislocation
متن کامل
Clitic-Agreement Doubling in Yurok
Abstract In Clitic-Agreement Doubling, Φ-features of the same verbal argument are simultaneously expressed by pronominal clitics and verbal agreement. The Algic language Yurok (Robins, 1958) exhibits CliticAgreement Doubling (CAD) in specific syntactic contexts requiring clitics in addition to agreement, but provides also strategies to avoid this type of redundancy by suppressing otherwise expe...
متن کاملOn Linkhood, Topicalization and Clitic Left Dislocation
This paper focuses on the Information Packaging notion of linkhood and provides a structural definition of this notion for Greek. We show that a combination of structural resources – syntactic (left dislocation), morphological (clitic duplication) and phonological (absence of nuclear accent) – are simultaneously exploited to realize linkhood in Greek, a generalization that can be captured in a ...
متن کاملClitic doubling and differential object marking
This work follows the progression of a grammatical construction that unifies the Romanian accusative preposition pe with a coreferential pronominal clitic, together forming the cd-pe construction. On the basis of historical texts, it is argued that these two grammatical phenomena evolved into a clause-level construction with a dedicated semantics and pragmatics in the modern language. A corpus ...
متن کامل