In support of a syntactic analysis of double agreement phenomena in Spanish

Compound tenses may display double agreement in non-standard varieties of Spanish. Harris & Halle (2005) present a body of new data for affirmative imperatives, where third person plural -n is reduplicated (once or twice) or switches places with a clitic (metathesis). Kayne (2008) proposes a syntactic reinterpretation of the data, analyzing imperatives as compound tenses with silent auxiliaries (Kayne 1992). The contending assumptions in these works concern a long standing debate on whether agreement morphology is a product of syntactic operations or the syntax-phonology interface. This paper defends the former view building on an independent proposal by Alcázar and Saltarelli (2008a,b), who identify a prescriptive light verb in imperative clauses. We extend the analysis to imperative expressions with first and third person subjects, proposing that these imperative clauses feature an additional causative head.