Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario
Edited by Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-Corominas
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11] 2017
► pp. 101–125

Chapter 5
Laísmo and “le-for-les”

To agree or not to agree

| Michigan State University
| University of Central Florida

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.

Keywords: Spanish clitics, applicative morpheme, agreement, “le-for-les”, laísmo
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“Le-for-les” and the presence of accusative clitics: A common core
    • 2.1Background on “le-for-les” constructions
    • 2.2“Le-for-les” and the presence of accusative clitics: Evidence for a uniform treatment
    • 2.3Main assumptions and proposal
    • 2.4Accounting for “le-for-les” and the presence of accusative clitics
  • 3.Lack of agreement in laísta dative clitics
  • 4.A uniform account of “le-for-les” and “le-for-la”
    • 4.1Parallelism between “le-for-les” and “le-for-la”
    • 4.2A further prediction: Lack of “la-for-las”
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.05aus
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Pineda, Anna
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Pineda, Anna
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