Clitics, DOM and ellipsis

An experimental comparative study in three dialects of Spanish

Abstract

This paper discusses the correlation between clitics, DOM and ellipsis in Spanish. As observed by Cyrino & Ordóñez (2018), strict and sloppy readings can be obtained in both TP ellipsis and argument ellipsis with clitics. However, DOM animate antecedents severely limit the availability of sloppy readings in argument ellipsis with clitics. This is a new observation, and judgments about the lack of sloppy readings is often delicate. We carried out an experimental study in order to confirm the data reported in Cyrino & Ordóñez (2018). We also wanted to test whether this distinction applied to speakers of three different dialects of Spanish where distribution of clitics and doubling differs. The results show a significant statistical anti animacy effect for obtaining sloppy readings with clitics. This effect is not found with TP ellipsis. In this paper we propose a syntactic approach to account for such effect with clitics. We propose that clitics contain an empty doubled (see also Bošković 2018). We propose an analysis based on the idea that DOM objects are moved out of the vP and that the doubled DOM KP undergoes vehicle change to become a pronoun in the case of argument ellipsis.