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Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 36:1 (2023) ► pp.270–306

Computational modeling of a generative grammar for clitic order in River Plate Spanish

ORCID logo | Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
ORCID logo | Universidad Nacional del Comahue | CONICET

The order of clitics (CLs) in Romance languages has been studied in depth by many scholars since Perlmutter’s first approach. This author points out that person and case features impose a filter that results in the following pattern in Spanish: Se- II- I- III dat - III acc . This pattern has been revisited because it is not restrictive enough: it gives rise to impossible sequences. In this context, the goal of this work is to define a pattern of morphosyntactic features for River Plate Spanish clitics, and an ordering pattern, with the purpose of developing a computational model for an automatic analysis of this phenomenon. This kind of analysis is justified because the algorithm output shows the degree of success of the descriptive proposal. To this end, we use NooJ, a linguistic development environment that has diverse tools. The computational modeling involves two stages: (i) the creation of an electronic dictionary and (ii) the creation of a computational grammar. The algorithm developed can generate all correct sentences conformed by Nominative Pronoun + CL + CL + Verb, Non-Finite Verb-CL-CL and Imperative Verb-CL-CL, and it can recognize these kinds of expressions in written text assigning the correct semantic labels. With these results, we conclude that our descriptive proposal is adequate for the analysis of sequences of clitics in River Plate Spanish.

Keywords: clitic order, River Plate Spanish, argument structure, semantic labels, computational linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Order in clitic sequences
    • 2.1Clitic ordering
    • 2.2Clitic combinations
    • 2.3On argument structure
  • 3.Automatic analysis of Spanish clitics: Previous approaches
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1A proposal on morphosyntactic features
    • 4.2Creation of an electronic pronoun dictionary
    • 4.3Creation of a syntactic grammar
  • 5.Obtained results
  • 6.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.20053.koz
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