Reconstructing clitic doubling

Abstract

This paper systematically investigates reconstruction properties of Greek clitic doubled objects, motivates an analysis, and shows how this new evidence distinguishes between the numerous existing analyses of Clitic Doubling (CD). It is shown that CD-ed objects are externally merged in argument positions, not adjunct (pace Philippaki-Warburton et al. 2004) and that they must undergo XP/Xmax movement, by contrast to non CD-ed objects, into the middle field between vP and TP, like A-scrambling (Sportiche 1996). Alternative analyses where the doubled object undergoes X0/Xmin movement (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1997; Preminger 2019 i.a.) or feature movement (Anagnostopoulou 2003; Marchis & Alexiadou 2013) are shown to be unable to capture this data. Furthermore, the paper argues that CD-ed XPs undergo movement into the middle field in order to license a syntactic feature that relates to their interpretive properties. It also considers the interpretive properties of clitics, and shows that they are expletive determiners lacking semantic import. Lastly, it suggests that clitics can only be present if certain locality conditions are satisfied.