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Differential Object Marking in Romance: Towards microvariation
Edited by Monica Alexandrina Irimia and Alexandru Mardale
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 280] 2023
► pp. 85–104

Clitic doubling in Brazilian Portuguese as a DOM strategy

| POSLIN-UFMG

This article shows that clitic doubling in Brazilian Portuguese is possible if the direct and indirect objects correspond to a first or a second person pronoun. We posit that the clitics are required whenever the doubled object carries a familiar [topic] feature, whose presence depends on the semantic properties of the nominal item. We postulate that the clitics are merged in the head Do to value the uninterpretable φ-feature of the head Do and the uninterpretable topic feature of the object. This proposal entails that there is a transfer of the topic feature from Ko to Do, which explains why the clitic is spelled out on the head of DP. We claim that the phenomenon of clitic doubling can be viewed as a side effect of differential object marking. This mechanism contrasts with typical DOM in Romance languages in the sense that it does not licence a preposition in a prenominal position.

Keywords: clitic doubling, DOM, person feature, topic and case
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Empirical data: Clitic doubling of direct and indirect objects
    • 2.1Summary of the section
  • 3.Theoretical assumptions
  • 4.The syntactic and semantic effects of clitic doubling
  • 5.The syntactic derivation of clitic doubling in BP
    • 5.1Derivation of the indirect object constructions
  • 6.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.280.04bon
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