The formal semantics of clitic doubling

Abstract

This article presents a study of the semantics of clitic pronouns and clitic doubling in Spanish and related languages. Its main hypothesis is that the co-occurrence restrictions that are observed between the clitic element and its quantifier associate can be properly characterized within Generalized Quantifiers Theory. Clitics are treated as generalized quantifier functions which are restricted to a context set In clitic doubling constructions, the context set is retrieved from the doubled NP-quantifier. Three main constraints are formulated that restrict this mechanism: the Principal Filter Constraint, the Presuppositionality Constraint, and the Context Dependence Constraint. The resulting interactions are studied in a variety of configurations with respect to generalized quantifiers of different properties, namely clitic doubling of existential, universal, negative quantifiers and doubling in questions.

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