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Part of
Atypical predicate-argument relations
Edited by Thierry Ruchot and Pascale Van Praet
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 33] 2016
► pp. 61–85

IO realizations in Spanish reverse psych verb sentences

| University of Texas, Austin

This paper examines the little-known morphosyntactic variation involving Spanish psych verbs that take an experiencer IO and a stimulus subject. With these verbs, a dative clitic duplicating the IO is widely assumed to be obligatory in the canonical [IO-V-S] order (A la gente joven LE/*Ø gustan los deportes ‘Young people like sports’). However, naturally occurring data from corpora show that clitic doubling is not obligatory in the non canonical [S-V-IO] order, yielding two variant constructions (Los deportes LE/Ø gustan a la gente joven ‘Sports appeal to young people’). Using written corpus data from Peninsular Spanish, the paper investigates two issues: (a) what is the overall distribution of clitic doubling in [S-V-IO] psych verb sentences?; (b) are there any systematic distributional differences between the two variants? With respect to (a), we found that for none of the 10 psych verbs surveyed was clitic doubling obligatory. With respect to (b), we found the presence of a clitic tends to restrict the referential properties of the lexical IO in terms of animacy, pronominality, individuality, and number. The findings of this study indicate that dative clitics, which are commonly analyzed as IO-V agreement markers, actually make a substantive contribution to the semantics of psych verb sentences.

Published online: 8 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.33.03nis
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Corpus

Corpus de Referencia de Español Actual (CREA)
Spanish Royal Academy. [URL]
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Ganeshan, Ashwini
2019. Examining agentivity in Spanish reverse-psych verbs. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 12:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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