10. Clitic doubling, complex heads and interarboreal operations

Romanian, as well as certain varieties of Spanish (but not Iberian Spanish, French or Italian) allow the clitic doubling of direct objects (indirect objects will be left out here),1 a phenomenon that is subject to clear crosslinguistic differences: in Spanish, but not in Romanian, clitic doubling is blocked by contrastive Focus and quantificational features. Our analysis of this contrast will rely on the following theoretical ingredients: (i) (most cases of) Head-Movement will be analyzed in terms of Head to Head Merge (Dobrovie-Sorin 2000; Dobrovie-Sorin & Galves 2000); (ii) clitic placement will be analyzed as a Spec-Head agreement configuration with a null pronounpro sitting in the Spec of (the complex head containing) the clitic (revised version of Sportiche 1996); (iii) clitic doubling will be analyzed as resulting from an interarboreal operation (Bobaljik & Brown 1997) that merges a complex head Cl+Vv+T(ense) with the vP containing the clitic doubled dp; (iv) the contrasts between Romanian and (River Plate) Spanish will be analyzed as being due to the fact that in Spanish, Spec,CP is distinct from Spec,Cl+Vv+T, whereas in Romanian, comp is part of the complex functional head clustering around T, and correlatively, Spec,C is not distinct from, but rather a slot inside the Spec of the complex head Comp+Cl+Vv+T.