Laísmo And “Le-For-Les” : To Agree Or Not To Agree

Keywords

Agreement; Applicative morpheme; Laísmo; Spanish clitics; “le-for-les”

Abstract

This paper discusses and analyzes the syntactic correlation between three different phenomena in Spanish: The presence of the accusative clitic, the presence/ absence of number agreement in the dative clitic (a phenomenon called “le-for-les”), and the presence/absence of gender agreement in the dative clitic in laísta dialects. Assuming that accusative clitics manifest exclusively an agreement morpheme and that dative clitics can be decomposed into an applicative morpheme and an optional agreement morpheme, we argue for a unified account of these structures as follows: The presence of the accusative clitic and obligatory agreement in the dative are reflexes of the realization of an agreement morpheme in the structure. The analysis we propose also accounts uniformly for the unavailability of “la-for-las” or partial agreement in laísta dialects.

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Publication Title

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory

Volume

11

Number of Pages

101-125

Document Type

Article; Book Chapter

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.05aus

Socpus ID

85079064423 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85079064423

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